Till about the 1950s, ‘dude’ still had this connotation of someone out of place, a tourist trying to dress like a local and failing. And in that sense, it was gender neutral for a bit. Then, somehow, it became cool.
Read moreAllusionist 134 Lacuna transcript
CRYSTIAN CRUZ: Some of the content was censored at the very beginning, but some was censored at the very end of the process. So they were just about to print out the new edition and then they had to stop the machines and say, “No, that's content was not approved, so we have to replace it at the very last moment.” So that guy would have to come up with some recipes.
HZ: That’s a lot of pressure on a linotype printer - not just having to deal with very late changes to the paper, but mentally having to bake a cake too.
CRYSTIAN CRUZ: And then the thing is, they didn't work at all, because the guy had just made it up.
Read moreAllusionist 133 Cake Is Mightier Than The Sword transcript
JUAN PALACIOS: So as a funny, but actually as a political comment, a political statement, they start naming the pastries with these names. Who would they attack? The police; the army; the church: the structures of power that they were trying to take down. Hence the names. It's funny but it was more than that. It's a political statement.
MADI LANG: It really characterizes the people. Because I don't think they thought they were going to start a revolution. They were just being kind of disrespectful in a very open, normal way, like, what if instead of calling it pizza they called it "the fuck you"?
Allusionist 131 Podlingual transcript
JAMES KIM: I wanted that experience for everybody to be in the character's shoes, and understand how it's like for somebody that you love to talk to you, but you can't understand a word that they're saying.
Read moreAllusionist 130 Valentine transcript
ST VALENTINE: I’m actually also the patron saint of beekeepers, epilepsy and plagues, but you don’t see beekeeper-shaped boxes of chocolates in the supermarkets in February, do you?
Read moreAllusionist 129 Sorry transcript
MARJORIE INGALL: We dislike "for any hurt caused", "for anyone who was offended", because the "any" implies maybe it was no one. And it's clear that if you're apologising, someone was offended. It's not in any sort of airy-fairy situation. That's another way, again, it's all about distancing yourself from what you did.
HZ: Yeah, and removing agency.
MARJORIE INGALL: Yes.
SUSAN McCARTHY: If your castle is surrounded by people shouting with pitchforks and torches, and you're up on the battlements shouting, "Sorry if I caused any offence," you know you caused offence.
Allusionist 128 Bonus 2020 transcript
KATE LISTER: When you're looking back at old texts and they're talking about 'slut holes' that need clearing out, it makes us fall about laughing; but what they actually mean was like a hole that was just full of rubbish and crap in the street, that you'd put coal into and store there. And there's something that was called ‘slut wool’ as well. You know when you lift up the sofa or the bed and you call them dust bunnies now, all those balls of dust - that was ‘slut wool’ once upon a time.
Read moreAllusionist 127 A Festive Hit for 2020 transcript
Nothing says "Happy Holidays, fam" like "Stay the fuck away from me".
Read moreAllusionist 126 Survival: Custodians of the Languages transcript
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.
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