The Allusionist

Adventures in language with Helen Zaltzman. TheAllusionist.org

http://theallusionist.org/

Eine durchschnittliche Folge dieses Podcasts dauert 21m. Bisher sind 210 Folge(n) erschienen. Alle zwei Wochen gibt es eine neue Folge dieses Podcasts.

Gesamtlänge aller Episoden: 3 days 10 hours 20 minutes

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190. Craters


When PhD student Annie Lennox discovered a crater on Mercury, she got the chance to name it. Which sent her on a bigger space mission.

Get the transcript of this episode, and find links to more information about the topics therein including how to get involved with the next planetary hackathon, at theallusionist.org/craters.

This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman. The music is by Martin Austwick of palebirdmusic.com...


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   37m
 
 

Tranquillusionist: Person In Scene


This is the Tranquillusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, soothe your brain by saying a load of words that don’t really mean very much, to give you an emotional break by temporarily supplanting your interior monologue with something you can benignly ignore. Note: this is NOT a normal episode of the Allusionist, where you might learn something about language and your brain might be energised. The Tranquillusionist's purpose is to rest your brain and for you to learn nothing...


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   1h4m
 
 

189. Mouthful of Fortune


At Lunar New Year, certain foods are particularly lucky to eat. Why? Because in Chinese, their names are puns on fortunate things. Damn, maybe noodles are all it takes to get me into puns after all... Professor Miranda Brown, cultural historian of China specialising in food and drink, explains the wordplay foods of new year, and why names are so resonant in Chinese...


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 February 10, 2024  25m
 
 

188. Lipread


Lipreading has been in the news this month, thanks to gossip-stoking mouth movements at the Golden Globes that the amateur lipreaders of The Internet rushed to interpret. But lipreading tutor Helen Barrow describes how reading lips really works - the confusable consonants, the importance of context and body language - and gossip maven Lainey Lui explains why these regularly occurring lipreading gossip stories are unworthy of a second or even first glance...


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 January 28, 2024  42m
 
 

187. Bonus 2023


It's our annual end of year parade of all the extra good stuff this year's podguests talked about, including a mythical disappearing island, geese, human dictionaries, the dubious history of the Body Mass Index, Victorian death department stores, and much more...


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 December 24, 2023  1h2m
 
 

186. Ravels


We’ve got knitting! We’ve got eponyms!! We’ve got knitting eponyms!!! Which come with a whole load of battles, f-boys, duels, baseball, scandals - and socks, lots of socks.

Fibre artist and Yarn Stories podcaster Miriam Felton discusses why grafting should ditch the name 'kitchener stitch'; we learn about the eponymous cardigan; and two towns in Ontario take pretty different approaches to having problematic namesakes...


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 December 12, 2023  33m
 
 

185. Gems and Patties


We’re returning to the theme of renaming, for two food-related renamings: the first one that mostly happened, the second that mostly did not - but in a good way.

Dr Erin Pritchard persuaded a British supermarket to rebrand a type of sweets that had a slur in their name. And Chris Strikes recounts the renaming conflict that was the Toronto Patty Wars of 1985...


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 November 20, 2023  37m
 
 

184. Misophonia


The word 'misophonia' describes a condition that statistically, 20 per cent of you have: an extreme reaction to certain sounds...


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 November 6, 2023  52m
 
 

Apple Fest!


All aboard, we're off to the 2023 Apple Festival at the University of British Columbia, to taste some apples and, most importantly, enjoy some apple names. And before that, we return to the classic Sporklusionist applesode to refresh our memory about how apple names are chosen - eponyms, portmanteaus, geography, or corporate R&D, just like how our ancestors named apples.

Dan Pashman hosts The Sporkful podcast - head to the Sporkful podfeed or sporkful...


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 October 23, 2023  41m
 
 

183. Timucua


When Spanish missionaries arrived in what is now called Florida, there were 100,000-200,000 Timucua people in the region. Just two centuries later, there were fewer than 100. Soon, with all the people who spoke it dead, the Timucua language died out, too, preserved only in a few Spanish-Timucua religious texts...


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 October 10, 2023  35m