HARRY JOSEPHINE GILES: Our behaviour and our desires will always exceed any terminology that anyone can come up with. And so rather than trying to find the right terms - and this for me is like what working in, what trying to come up with an LGBT Scots glossary does: it's a chance to imagine. It's a chance not to come up with the right way of saying things, but to say: what if we thought about it this way? What if we thought about it that way? What assumptions are built into the languages that we use?
Read moreAllusionist 116: My Dad Excavated a Porno transcript
HZ: The Victorians really did a number on people. I feel like we're still unpicking Victorian attitudes.
KATE LISTER: Yes, we are. I mean, we're still very much the children of the Victorians, and they're a fascinating bunch, the Victorians. No generation, at no point in history, has sex been successfully repressed, ever. It just doesn't happen. But what you have is really strict social morality, conditioning and mores and constructs and power dynamics around sex that dictate what we are and what we're not supposed to be doing. And outward facing, they were so repressed and polite society and so offended by everything even remotely to do with sex, to the point of where they wouldn't say the word 'trousers' because they thought they were too rude. They were 'sit down upons'.
Read moreAllusionist 115. Keep Calm and transcript
HZ: Does being told to keep calm work?
JANE GREGORY: I can think of so many ways why it doesn't work.
Tranquillusionist: Punchlines transcript
This is the Tranquillusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, in the interests of temporarily trying to stop that feeling where you think your brain is trying to claw its way out of your skull, read the punchlines to classic jokes. No setups; just the punchlines.
Read moreTranquillusionist: Best In Show transcript
This is the Tranquillusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, for the purposes of calming a frazzled brain, read the winners of the Best in Show at the Westminster Dog Show.
Read moreTranquillusionist: Nmgiiea transcript
This is the Tranquillusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, for the purposes of quelling anxiety and stress and sleeplessness, read the lyrics to ‘Imagine’ by John Lennon, with the words arranged in reverse alphabetical order.
Read moreTranquillusionist: Your Soothing Words transcript
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, read out the words that you've told me you find the most soothing.
Read moreAllusionist 114. Alarm Bells transcript
ROBIN WEBSTER: I am as guilty as any, having worked as a sort of techie professional in this for a long time of writing those sentences that go "By 2050, the trajectory of the curve will be movement this and carbon capture and storage," these paragraphs that just mean nothing to nobody. And they are about things which are far away in time, far away in place. We were using these words like ‘sustainability’ and ‘trajectory’ and ‘parts per million’. And I was like, what on earth is this language? It doesn't say anything.
HZ: ‘Parts per million’: that's the stuff to get people up and ready for action.
ROBIN WEBSTER: 450 parts per million, let's go!
Allusionist 113. Zaltzology transcript
ALIE WARD: Carrie Studard wants to know: “Are there any synonyms for the most hated word, ‘moist’?”
HZ: Moist. Do you hate the word ‘moist’?
ALIE WARD: At this point, it's an underdog. You know what I mean? Like, can moist live? Can it just do its business? I don't hate it.
HZ: It's fine.
ALIE WARD: I don't hate it. I tend to think of dew or grass more than I think of...
HZ: Well, that's a lovely form of moisture. I suppose the people who hate it are maybe thinking of bodily crevices. And that's their prejudice showing.
ALIE WARD: Yes, it is.
HZ: Yeah. Because other words like ‘damp’ - I mean, if you're moist from the rain, like a raincoat. Damp. Is that better? Is that worse? A bodily crevice could also be damp.
ALIE WARD: Sure. I feel like moist has a certain heat to it that damp lacks.
HZ: A steaminess rather than chilliness. It's good that we're figuring these things out.
Read moreAllusionist special: Podcast Podcast transcript
I’m here to talk about a word that a lot of people hate: podcast.
Read moreAllusionist 111. Engraving part 2: Precious transcript
MAX ULLMANN: I like how this is typical of all antique jewellery, in a way, it's just completely symmetrical and totally imperfect. In a world of perceived perfection, this is far more interesting. You know, you can really see that somebody is done that by hand. You know, the A is lower than the Z and the E, the horizontal arms of the E, are too short by modern standards. It’s certainly not perfect. There's bits and pieces of the letters missing, but you can really put yourself in the position of the person doing it, who obviously was not able to achieve this kind of perceived perfection because they're human.
Read moreAllusionist 110. Engraving part 1: Epitaph - transcript
DAVID NADELBERG: There's Ronald. Ronald didn't get any epitaph.
HZ: No. Maybe no one liked him.
DAVID NADELBERG: Or, maybe they just couldn't agree.
HZ: Or maybe there's too much to say.
Allusionist 109. East West - transcript
ÉTIENNE ROEDER: There are some words that still exist. There are some expressions you could still tell that these people that the people come from the East or the West. For example, in the Western part, they say ‘Plastik’, and in the Eastern part, I would say they say ‘Plaste’ because there was a company in the East - there was actually just one company in the East that produced plastics and that was called Plaste und Elaste, and because of that, all the people would call plastics ‘Plaste’. And you you could still tell today if someone says ‘Plaste’ and instead of ‘Plastik’ that this person is probably from the Eastern part.
ESTHER-MIRIAM WAGNER: ‘Plastetüte’ - plastic bag. I mean I remember going to school with a plastic bag and being sent home because it was a West German bag. This was a very precious item - you would keep a ‘Plastetüte’ for months and you would reuse it and reuse it and reuse it until it was just tatters. That was a precious object.
MATTHIAS EINHOFF: My son, when he tries to identify if someone is coming from a West German or East German family, he asks them how they call the thing that you put your bathroom things in: East Germans say ‘Waschtasche’ and West Germans say ‘Kulturbeutel’. And that’s the ultimate identifier whether you come from a East or West German family.
Read moreAllusionist 108. Enjoy! - transcript
SARA BROOKE CURTIS: An interesting thing with ‘enjoy’ is that it's become so common, because it’s so normal, so many people do it in all the different restaurants, to such an extent that there are restaurants that you could not say 'enjoy'. That was their biggest pet peeve, was saying ‘enjoy’. And it was massive.
HZ: Why?
SARA BROOKE CURTIS: Because they didn't want their servers to act like robots and they thought that if you said 'enjoy' that people would feel like they're anywhere, and that you're not expressing anything; you're just saying this thing that people say all the time.
HZ: Where does it come from? Is there this cabal like the Pantone colour thing where it's like, "This year everyone will be wearing forest green" - is there that for service vocabulary?
SARA BROOKE CURTIS: Yeah, I think there is. I really do think there is.
Allusionist 107. Apples - transcript
KATHRYN GRANDY: After the name was selected and initially growers and even some people from WSU didn't really like the name Cosmic Crisp.
HZ: Oh, why not?
KATHRYN GRANDY: They said it's like The Jetsons, too futuristic.
HZ: Is that bad?
KATHRYN GRANDY: You know, I love the name; and being futuristic and like The Jetsons I think is pretty cool. But the one thing I've learned being in marketing is everybody is an art director. Somebody wanted to named Cosmic Crisp ‘Sparkle’. And to me, that makes me think of dish soap.
