RUDI BREMER: One aspect of of what happened in Australia, as far as colonisation, is the assimilation policy. And in broad strokes, the way that that worked was Aboriginal people were rounded up, and taken from their land and placed on missions. And from there you were forced to only speak English. You couldn't teach your children your language, you couldn't teach them your culture.
Read moreAllusionist 125 Swearalong Quiz transcript
Today, we’re going to destress, let off some steam, with the Swearlusionist Swearalong quiz.
Read moreAllusionist 124 Nightmare transcript
Around 700 years ago, the word ‘haunt’ first appeared in written English, at least 200 years before it took on the meaning of a ghost frequenting a place.
HZ: It just meant that way where someone haunts a bar, as in they go to it a lot, but they're not an actual ghost. But it also meant to have sex with. And I could not do enough Googling safely to find out why it had that sense, because it just came up with a lot of websites about people having sex with ghosts. So I cannot find the etymology of this middle English use of 'haunt' in the sexual sense.
PAUL BAE: You've just screwed up your Google ads logarithm by looking up succubus, haunting, "Why sex haunting?"
HZ: The things I do for this show.
PAUL BAE: Exactly.
Allusionist 123 Celebrity transcript
GREG JENNER: If we look back at classical sources, where do we get fame from? What does it mean? What's the origin point? The Greeks had a goddess called Pheme, and she is a winged, beautiful goddess, with a trumpet. She parps a trumpet. And that is your name being sung into the heavens through the trumpet. So it's a nice thing. It's good. You get fame and it means people going to hear about you. But when you get to the Romans, and we get one of the most famous Roman writers, Virgil, in his Aeneid, he talks about Fama, where we get our word 'fame' from. That derives from the verb 'fari', meaning to speak or gossip about someone. And Virgil's Fama is not a beautiful goddess with wings and a parping trumpet; she's basically Godzilla. She's a terrifying, massive monster who stalks the land and she's covered with eyes and ears and tongues, and she grows in scale the more people that are gossiping about you. So the more you're being chatted about or gossiped about, the larger this monster becomes until she's vanishing into the clouds and she never sleeps. And she hunts you down. And Virgil's version of fame is predatory. It's terrifying. It's this enormous force of nature that comes for you, and there's nothing you can do about it.
Read moreAllusionist 122 Ghostwriter transcript
BUFFON: I was like, am I supposed to punch her?
MPUTUBWELE: Nelly knows this is the word for ghostwriter.
BUFFON: Everybody knows that word in France.
MPUTUBWELE: But it's one thing to know that word, and it's another to hear it said to you.
Allusionist 121 No Title transcript
About to go onstage to perform No Title for the first time, at SF Sketchfest 2019 at the Brava Theatre in San Francisco. Photo by Martin Austwick.
The bank clerk scrolls down and down this list of titles and honorifics, this enormous list of different ways to present ourselves, and I just want an option that doesn’t reflect my marital status, because why did all the available male titles not reflect marital status whereas female ones did? And come to think of it, why do titles reflect gender anyway? Why does anything reflect gender? What is the point of gender?
I was asking a question I am not intelligent enough to answer. And I wasn’t expecting this moment, in the bank, on a seemingly trivial and pointless mission, to be my introduction to gender studies and queer theory, but you don’t necessarily get to choose the learning moments of your life.
And in case you’re sitting there thinking, “Well. If if it’s SO important to you to have a title that does not reflect your marital status or your gender, why don’t you just become a rabbi?” Well, my family lapsed HARD. None of us is becoming a rabbi. We’d never make it. They can see the bacon in our eyes.
Read moreAllusionist redux rerun: The Away Team
EMMA BRIANT: Recognizing someone's humanity is crucial. Calling someone a migrant, calling someone an asylum seeker, calling them a refugee. These are official categories; but in many ways, depending on how they use them, they can change and become more negative. And they also preference how officials are sorting them over their very basic humanity.
Read moreAllusionist 120 Shine Theory transcript
AMINATOU SOW: Hi. We are Ann Friedman and Aminatou Sow, and we are the authors of the book Big Friendship, as well as the hosts of the podcast Call Your Girlfriend.
HZ: And at some point between 2009, when they met and befriended each other, and 2013, when Ann used it in an article in New York Magazine, Aminatou and Ann coined the term Shine Theory.
ANN FRIEDMAN: I think this is just something that, you know, you probably said to me first, “I don't shine if you don't shine.” And then it became a thing we said frequently to each other and to other friends.
AMINATOU SOW: I will confess that it is the lyric from the Killers album that I just enjoyed a lot.
Read moreAllusionist 119. Blood Is Not Water transcript
ANTHONY RUSSELL: I want to have a vocabulary in order to be able to talk about things that directly affect me as an as an African-American, and as a black Jew, and as a Jew, I should have I should be able to talk about things that affect my life.
Read moreAllusionist 118 Survival: Bequest transcript
ELIZABETH KEREKERE: I'm so convinced that transphobia, biphobia, homophobia are such an integral part of colonisation, I reject that as a colonial construct, I reject it as racist.
As they took our land - tried to take all of our land, tried to take all of our language and suppress our culture, they also took our expressions of sexuality and gender. And that is important to us in a core part of our culture, especially because the way that the institutional racism, the intergenerational trauma that is the legacy of colonisation has impacted on us and the levels of discrimination against people with diverse genders, sexualities and sex characteristics, that we see that all of this, all of this was a massive attempt to cover up what was already there and pretend it never happened.
Allusionist 117 Many Ways At Once transcript
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.
Allusionist 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.
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