Listen to this episode and find out more about the people and topics therein at theallusionist.org/bonus2024.
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, have been stashing away special Allusiobits all year, when the people who appeared on the show said interesting things that I couldn’t fit into their episode because there wasn’t room or it was not about language - waiting, just waiting, for this, the annual Bonus episode! This year we’ve got something called the ‘universal blank’, which actually does not refer to my emotions; we’ve got tricorn hats, poets with migraines, and why Boston cream pie isn’t a pie. And so much more.
Content note: in the latter half of the show we talk a bit about cancer, but I’ll let you know when that particular section is about to come up and in case you need to skip, I’ll tell you how long you’ll need to skip.
If you seek a gift for someone ASAP, then how about tickets to the Allusionist’s tenth birthday live extravaganza on 12 January 2025, at the Rio Theatre in Vancouver which is one of my favourite venues? Also, excitingly, you can now give the gift of patreonising the Allusionist. Go to patreon.com/allusionist/gift to treat the podfan in your life, and they’ll get what every supporter of the show gets in return for their donation: regular livestreams where I read from my collection of reference books; behind the scenes info about the making of every episode, which is some of my most eccentric work; membership of the charming Allusioverse Discord community, where members have been translating recipes for each other, showing their newest coloured inks, and getting cross at portmantos like ‘barndominium’, ‘ecolution’ and ‘scoon’. And we watch films and TV together, soon we’ll do Cold Comfort Farm and there’ll be a new season of Great Pottery Throwdown to sustain us through January. Join us yourself! theallusionist.org/donate.
I’ve also been livestreaming me reading the whole of A Christmas Carol with musical and visual accompaniment by Martin Austwick, you can find those videos at youtube.com/allusionistshow.
Thanks so much to you for listening to the Allusionist this year and recommending it to people and telling me your thoughts about past and potential future topics. You lot really are the best.
On with the 2024 bonus bits.
HZ: In the episode about medieval Scottish flyting, a sort of slam poetry or battle rap, historical linguist Joanna Kopaczyk talked about one of its most high profile practitioners, William Dunbar. But he had a lot of range.
JOANNA KOPACZYK: He writes on all sorts of topics. He writes about headaches. He writes all kinds of poetry in which he's trying to persuade his patron, the King, to give him more money. He's writing religious poetry; he's writing very sort of flamboyant celebratory poems; and he writes flyting as well.
HZ: So many questions, but what was William Dunbar writing about headaches?
JOANNA KOPACZYK: Oh he's got this really nice - I mean, “nice” - a really interesting poem in which he just complains about a migraine. And this is something that is quite unusual for 15th century late 15th century poetry. So he says something like, "My brow is pierced with an arrow and I can't open my eyes because the light is so abusive, I can't open my eyes, I can't look - “I canna luik upon the licht," I think he says something like that, because it's painful. And he just has this short three stanza reflection on how painful it is to get headaches and migraines.
HZ: I feel like a lot of people would find that very relatable.
JOANNA KOPACZYK: Absolutely. These are human beings, the poets who we study; it's not that detached from what we know from our own experience. But it's quite unusual to find someone commenting on a personal subject like a headache in the context of medieval poetry, because people weren't really writing personal stuff that much. Patrons were not probably that much interested in sponsoring poems on ailments and that kind of thing. So it's it's really surprising that it actually survives.
HZ: Maybe that was one that he wrote for himself, not the patron.
JOANNA KOPACZYK: Yeah, yeah.
HZ: In the Good Grids episode about exciting new developments in US crossword puzzles, Juliana Pache talked about making Black Crossword, the daily mini crossword she launched in January 2023.
HZ: What else did you learn that you couldn't possibly have known before you embarked on this?
JULIANA PACHE: There were some things that I picked up on pretty quickly, which is the, the length of a blank. So if you have a crossword puzzle and it says blank and then word - like, let's say if my name was going to be in it, my name is Juliana Pache: “Juliana _ _ _”. The blank would have to be three underscores, but not more. My last name is Pache, P-A-C-H-E, five letters. You wouldn't wanna put five underscores to mark the blank. You would want to always put three blanks, because you don't want to give it away. So that's the standard for any blank is three.
HZ: Okay - the number of blanks are not relevant to the answer.
JULIANA PACHE: Right, it’s kind of just a length thing. So it's universal. That's the universal blank.
HZ: There's a universal blank! It's comforting in a way.
HZ: This year, as recounted in the episodes Beeing and Word Sport, I got to attend the finals of the Scripps National Spelling Bee - not as a contestant, I aged out in 1994, plus would never have made it beyond the nursery slopes of spelling. But it was fascinating to get to witness it take place; there’s so much going on to make this big event run smoothly in person as well as on television, and to make sure that the competition is fair. Linguist Ben Zimmer works on the Spelling Bee’s word panel, and as a judge during the rounds.
HZ: Tell us a bit more about what goes into some of the judging. Like there was a speller where it was hard to tell whether they were spelling C [cee] or Z [zee], for instance. How do you deal with those things?
BEN ZIMMER: Yeah. The judges are listening to exactly how the word is being spelled, and giving the speller the benefit of the doubt trying to make sure that they're actually saying the right letters. And in a case like cee versus zee, for instance, it can be a very subtle difference of voicing, right? It's just a voice versus unvoiced consonant. And there was a particular word that had a Z [zee] in it. And you couldn't quite hear the voicing. We're trying to hear it and there may be other noises and such, and ambient noise in the room. There are judges, but we also have folks behind the scenes who are also listening to playback. So if there's any question from the judges - "Was that a C or a Z which was said?" - they'll go back and listen to it maybe multiple times to make sure that we're getting it right in terms of identifying what the speller said. But I was joking about how if only Americans, as in British English or Canadian English, had said zed instead of zee, then it would be much easier to differentiate C and Z. There you go. Cee and Zed. You can really tell what the difference is.
HZ: Yes. Food for thought for the USA.
HZ: Stacey Mei Yan Fong appeared in the Singlish Singlish episode, talking about her relationship with the Singlish language. Stacey is a baker, she is the author and pie-cook of the book 50 Pies, 50 States: an Immigrant's Love Letter to the Country She's Chosen to Call Home. She grew up in Singapore, Indonesia and Hong Kong, places where American-style pie is not such a usual foodstuff; but moving to the USA for college and making it her home in adulthood brought her to pie, and to the project where she baked and even sometimes invented a pie for all fifty American states.
STACEY MEI YAN FONG: Pie to me growing up was a very savoury thing, like it was not really sweet food. Like the only sweet pie really knew of was apple pie or cherry pie from like, you know, Def Leppard. When I thought about America, the most American food I could think of was pie, and also after deep research, there were all these slogans that were like “As American as apple pie” and it was the symbol of abundance. All apple pies are illustrated so tall, and they're sitting on a windowsill, and it's this Norman Rockwell vision of what America could be. And, you know, it's definitely not the America that exists, except maybe in the heart of Dolly Parton.
But, I picked pie because it was this blank canvas. And it was this 10-inch circle that I could really dictate what it was going to be like; I could really try and capture the state itself, crust, filling, and then topping in a certain way. And pie could be savoury or sweet, it could have ice cream, it could have meat in it, it could have fruit in it - it just felt like the perfect blank canvas.
So when I made up the pie, it was my interpretation. And I've gotten some really funny emails about how people think I got it wrong. And I've always loved that conversation because I'm like: what would you have done? Because this is my interpretation of Pennsylvania, or this is my interpretation of Texas. And it's usually the states where I did a savoury pie, where they felt like I should have done something sweet. And it's just such a funny conversation.
HZ: Yeah, because in Britain, savoury pies are much more common. But we wouldn't call pizza a pie, because what are people playing at with that?
STACEY MEI YAN FONG: Exactly. It's a pizza.
HZ: But then people get very heated about whether a pie must have pastry underneath as well as on top.
STACEY MEI YAN FONG: Yes. Because shepherd's pie doesn't at all have pastry.
HZ: Exactly. The semantics of pie can get very, they can get as hot as an oven fresh pie.
HZ: This is giving me flashbacks to when I tried to seek a definition of salad in 2021’s bonus episode and it proved very very tricky, slipperier than egg salad with too much mayonnaise; and pie is another foodstuff where any definition you attempt has many counter-examples.
STACEY MEI YAN FONG: So a fun fact about pie is, you know how the Boston cream pie is actually a cake?
HZ: What?! What is in a Boston cream pie? Thank you - I've not experienced it.
STACEY MEI YAN FONG: Okay. A Boston cream pie is like a pound cake with vanilla custard and chocolate on top. And why it's called a Boston cream pie is because pie plates were invented before cake pans. So cakes used to be baked in pie pans. So that's why it's called a Boston Cream Pie when it's actually a cake.
HZ: Thought-provoking.
STACEY MEI YAN FONG: Right? It’s kind of funny.
HZ: Boston cream pie is even the official dessert of Massachussetts, has been since 1996, so tough luck to all the other towns in that state and their desserts, the Provincetown pavlova, the Salem sundae, the Quincy quince turnover, the Chikopee chickpea pie, the Nantucket bucket…
More food now, but a bit less appetizing, from AJ Jacobs, who appeared on the Lemon Demon episode.
AJ JACOBS: I read a book recently that had mentioned a study that that was all about framing, how you frame reality. And there was a study where they gave people a smell, and it was the same smell, but they told half of the people that it was parmesan and half that it was vomit, because they really do smell very similar. And then people would say, “Oh, I like that smell” or “I find that smell repulsive,” depending on how it was framed. So I thought that was a nice life lesson. Do you see your life as parmesan or do you see it as vomit?
HZ: I suppose it's really circumstantial. Like, if it's something you're stepping in, probably parmesan is easier to clean off. If you're putting it on your food, definitely parmesan's better.
AJ JACOBS: Mmm.
HZ: If you're like, “I don't want this to be on my floor, I'll clean it up,” you need to know that it's vomit.
AJ JACOBS: Right, that's true. You definitely do want to treat those two substances differently.
HZ: Yeah, but just, you know, deal with what you have, rather than try to pretend that you don't have a pile of vomit.
AJ JACOBS: I like the realism.
HZ: I grew up in a pragmatic kind of environment. Where luckily our house was too cold to be able to smell many things.
AJ JACOBS: Oh, interesting.
HZ: AJ Jacobs is the host of The Puzzler podcast, a daily dose of games for listeners to solve, and when he came on this show he set me some little word puzzles.
AJ JACOBS: You've talked a lot about various -nyms on the show. I know you've talked about demonyms and eponyms. Have you talked about, by the way, capitalnyms, where a word changes when it goes from capital to lowercase? Like Polish and polish.
HZ: I haven't. Now's our time.
AJ JACOBS: That is one of my favourites. Well, this is actually not that - I love the capitalnym, but this is a retronym, which is a term that had to be coined when a new version of that object came out. So before electric guitar came out, you never needed the term “acoustic guitar”, because all guitars were acoustic. So “acoustic guitar” is a retronym. So that is what a retronym is, and there are a surprising number of them. So I'm going to give you a clue as to what caused this retronym to form, and you can, tell me what it is. This retronym came about after the introduction of 2%, 1% non-fat and skim - or skimmed as I believe you say in the UK.
HZ: So, whole milk?
AJ JACOBS: Whole milk, yes. How about this retronym came about after cell phones and mobile phones?
HZ: Oh, so like a landline.
AJ JACOBS: Exactly, a landline. Alright, I'll give you one more, which is a retronym that came about after the addition of Alaska and Hawaii to the United States.
HZ: Is it the lower 48 or the contiguous United States?
AJ JACOBS: You get double points, both! There's lower 48, which by the way, is not just a retronym, it's a misnomer.
HZ: Because Hawaii's further south.
AJ JACOBS: Exactly. And then contiguous - there are all sorts, there's mainland, continental there's also ‘conterminous’.
HZ: Conterminous! I’ve never used that term before.
HZ: AJ published a book, The Year of Living Constitutionally: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Constitution's Original Meaning, about how he spent a year trying to live as closely as possible to the US constitution. Which was mostly written in 1789, when men padded their calves to look sexy, wrote with quills on parchment, and ate a lot of food flavoured with cloves.
HZ: Did you only eat food from the period?
AJ JACOBS: Not only, but I certainly did cook as much as I could. I had a dinner party, an 18th century dinner party, where we served - I wanted turtle soup, but that's hard to source. We had beef stew - again, with a lot of cloves.
HZ: Did you eat it?
AJ JACOBS: I had one bite, even though I'm more of a vegetarian. But for the experience, I did have a bite. And it was pretty good as far as beef stew goes. And we had rice pudding, and we had forks with two tines.
HZ: Aah!
AJ JACOBS: There were so many little things that I became grateful for, and tines was one of them. It's very hard - they're okay for spearing, but scoopage with two tines, very difficult. Another thing I will never take for granted again: elastic. I dressed the part, so I had my tricorn hat, which I have here, actually - I can put that on for you.
HZ: Oh! Oh, that's splendid.
AJ JACOBS: Yes, I am a big fan.
HZ: It's lovely.
AJ JACOBS: And I wore the stockings -
HZ: Did you pad your calves?
AJ JACOBS: No. I'm married, so I guess I don't have as much motivation to. But these stockings were authentically woven, and they had no elastic, so they would fall down by my ankles. So back then they had - they weren't even garters, they were pre-garters, they were these little tiny belts. So you had to spend, every morning, a minute putting little tiny belts around your socks. And it just made you realize we have a lot of problems in this world, but the good old days were not good. Not just because we lacked elastic, but for a lot of reasons.
HZ: Yeah, at least our underwear stays up now.
AJ JACOBS: Exactly. It is something to really be grateful for, those little things.
HZ: Maybe our shoes are a bit more supportive as well, in the arches.
AJ JACOBS: Oh yes, and originally they didn't have left or right shoes, you just had the same. I think by around the time I was doing, they did have left and right shoes. But yeah, my shoes were not comfortable, the ones I wore around, these buckled shoes.
HZ: The clothes look quite warm as well, whereas New York in summer is also warm.
AJ JACOBS: Oh, yes. Well, that was a problem, the wool clothing. And in fact, I went to a Revolutionary War reenactment of a battle in New Jersey. And it was in August, it was super hot, and you had all of this wool clothing, and I was sweating so much, I was so uncomfortable, that I eventually died - I chose to die during the battle, and I died in the shade. I made sure that I was shot in the shade.
HZ: Sensible.
AJ JACOBS: Yes, I was proud of that. But the actual battle: apparently it was an even hotter day, it was 98 degrees. This is according to lore. I was not able to fact check this: but according to lore, George Washington told his troops that they could take off their thick wool coat and fight in just their shirt sleeves. Whereas the British were much more interested in keeping up appearances, and so more of them died of heatstroke because they kept their wool coats on.
HZ: That sounds very British. We had school uniform and we weren't allowed to take off our blazers unless it was decreed by the school that we could over a certain temperature.
AJ JACOBS: Oh, really? And was there an actual temperature?
HZ: I don't know what the number it was, but they would like put up a red spot in one of the windows and you're like, okay, you're allowed.
AJ JACOBS: Wow. So wait, what was your uniform?
HZ: It was blazer, sweater, shirt, tie, tartan kilt…
AJ JACOBS: That's a lot. That's a lot to put on.
HZ: It's a silly place. Do you miss wearing the tricorn hats?
AJ JACOBS: Well, yes; I still do put it on. Yes, as far as the clothing goes, this is my favourite piece of clothing, the tricorn hat. I have several of them - and they take a while to make, so I had to order them and it took me about three or four months to get them. But I've got a couple now. So if you come to New York, you are welcome to borrow one or more.
HZ: Thank you. That's very generous.
AJ JACOBS: Of course.
HZ: Later we’ll hear more from AJ Jacobs; and coming up are Caroline Crampton and Zazie Todd.
Animal behaviour expert Zazie Todd appeared in the Lexicat episodes where we talked about communicating with cats and dogs via human language.
HZ: I know a lot of people worry about when they acquire a new animal friend, and they maybe want to give it a new name and they're worried: will the animal be able to associate with that name and do they need to pick something that resembles the old name? What in your opinion is the best move there?
ZAZIE TODD: I think it's best to pick the name that you want to give the animal. You don't have to stick with the name that they've had before. It's actually very easy to change the name. I think it helps to have a name that you are yourself going to be happy saying lots of times.
HZ: Good point.
ZAZIE TODD: So not massively long: probably two or three syllables is probably best. And it's actually very easy to change it. The way to do it is just to say the new name before the old name a few times. And there will come a point when you see your pet turning to look at you when they hear the new name, and then you'll know they've got it and you can drop the old name.
So for example, my current dog, we kept his existing name because we thought it suited him. My previous dog Bodger, he actually came to us with the name Buddy, and it's a fairly common name. There was another dog in our neighbourhood that we saw very often that was already called Buddy, and we thought this is just going to get confusing, and we wanted something a bit more unique. So we picked the name Bodger, as in someone who bodges stuff, to make it work. And so then for the first few times we said Buddy Bodger, every time we spoke to him, and in no time at all he got Bodger.
HZ: Wow.
ZAZIE TODD: He was actually a very clever dog. It only took him a few goes. Some dogs will maybe take a bit longer, but it's very easy for them to pick up a new name. So it's no problem at all if you want to change your pet's name. And the same would apply to a cat as well.
HZ: This is very good advice. Also, we give our animal friends like a lot of nicknames, and they seem to get along with that. So maybe it's just more people's worries about will the animal be settling in alright? What has the animal been through in their previous lives? All of that.
ZAZIE TODD: My dog is Pepper, but I also call him Peps, Pep Pep, Pepperino, Pepperami, all kinds of things. He responds to them all, he knows I mean him.
HZ: Okay: we are about to talk about illness, in particular cancer, and we refer to death from cancer as well as body size and weight. We don’t go into great detail, but if you need not to hear those topics, skip the next five and a half minutes.
Caroline Crampton of Shedunnit podcast returned to the show this year to talk about hypochondria, and her own health anxieties stemming from when she had cancer as a teenager. She writes about those topics in her recent, terrific book A Body Made of Glass, wherein she mentions problems with metaphor.
CAROLINE CRAMPTON: Susan Sontag wrote this famous book called Illness as Metaphor in which she really digs into two particular conditions, tuberculosis and cancer, and she looks at the metaphorical baggage that surrounds each one. And there's some really extraordinary stuff in the book about how, in a certain way, having tuberculosis was seen as as a stand-in for being artistic and delicate, in a good way; whereas cancer is something disgusting to be concealed and hidden. I think a really familiar one today is the idea of cancer as a battle. So we talk about someone lost their fight with cancer - rather metaphorically loaded language. Rather than just saying this person has cancer or this person has died of cancer, we say they lost their battle. And it's all association and figurative language that we build up around these very stark ideas about life and death, I think to insulate and protect ourselves from the horror of it and to try and make sense of it. Because if something really tragic happens, like a young person dies of cancer, if we say that they lost their battle with cancer, there's some implication in there that they could have won, that there was hope, and that if only things had just gone the right way. Whereas, you know, actually, maybe medically, once they had that diagnosis, that was it, the story was over.
HZ: Yeah. I always try and keep an eye on language that makes bad things seem self-determined.
CAROLINE CRAMPTON: Yeah, exactly. And a lot of the metaphorical language about illness really, really feels like that. So I think that's why we have so much metaphor around illnesses. It's a kind of self-defence tactic, a collective self-defence tactic that we engage in. Why it can be a problem is that it conceals the truth and it keeps us from confronting reality in some cases. And it's also very easy to import prejudices and negative connotations from elsewhere. An example I experienced personally was: I was 17 when I was diagnosed with cancer, and I got a lot of attention, including from the local paper where I lived, who wanted to do an article about the promising young student just about to head off to university, cut down in her prime by cancer. And I instantly hated and despised the idea of this; partly because it felt like too much attention, felt like giving the cancer too much attention, it felt like making my whole identity about cancer. But also I really despised the idea that just because I was 17, it was somehow more interesting.
HZ: Or that you're going to university?
CAROLINE CRAMPTON: Yeah, exactly.
HZ: What about a non-academic 17-year-old?
CAROLINE CRAMPTON: What about a non-academic 17-year-old, what about a 95-year-old, what about literally anyone who might be going through the same thing on the same day? Why this story? Why is this the one that you want to prioritise? And the answer is because, you know, the whole metaphor of youth taken too soon, or cut down in her prime, these are just very old and very reassuring and attractive stories; and mine fit neatly into that, and therefore they wanted it. So I think that's where metaphor can become harmful when it reinforces laziness and tropes and stereotypes that are not helpful. They don't help the person involved, and they don't help anyone else who you're maybe ignoring because you like that story better.
HZ: What is your response to the phrase, “You look well”?
CAROLINE CRAMPTON: I have a complicated history with this and, I… honestly, I don't like it. Because often - not always, but sometimes - “you look well” means “you look thin”.
HZ: A friend of mine who recently had a double mastectomy for cancer reasons says that afterwards people kept saying to her, “You look great! Have you lost weight?” Well technically she had, because surgery removed some body parts.
CAROLINE CRAMPTON: I had this experience when I was at my absolute illest: I was still at school and I was going to school, and people would tell me how well I looked, and it was because I was the thinnest I'd ever been. I was now like a standard thin girl size, I guess, whereas I'd always been overweight in my entire life up to that point. And so people telling me I looked well when I knew I had cancer and was very seriously ill - it really really messes you up to be told that, and very unpleasant to unpack all of the societal norms and pressures that are making people think that and say that. So yes, I'm not a big fan of “You look well.” I think, in general, don't comment on other people's appearance in any way.
HZ: Okay, the cancer and weight chat is done, but we’re still talking about the interplay of psychology and medicine, a famous example of which is the placebo effect.
CAROLINE CRAMPTON: It was first named and described in The Lancet in 1920, and it describes this effect whereby a treatment can have a positive impact, a positive outcome on someone, even when that's actually not its intended therapeutic effect. So either someone has received a dummy treatment but been told that they've received the real thing, or they've received a lesser dose but they've been told that it will do such and such, it will give this cure, it will produce this effect; and just the combination of the language and the medical theatre involved produces the effect of the treatment even if the treatment isn't actually present. The word placebo existed before that; it has its roots in the Latin word placare, a verb that just means to please or flatter.
HZ: The medical sense of ‘placebo’ was being used in print in the 1700s, enough to be enshrined in George Motherby’s New Medical Dictionary of 1785, where it was defined as “any medicine adapted more to please than benefit the patient.” But the word had been in English since about the 13th century; it came from the psalms, it was the name for the Vespers for the dead, because it appeared in the line “placebo Domino in regione vivorum” which meant “I shall please the Lord in the land of the living.”
Then around the late 14th century, the word took an interesting leap - to mean flatterers and sycophants, from the idea either of professional mourners singing the placebo on behalf of the family of the dead, or fake mourners performatively mourning to please the grieving relatives and getting invited to eat some of the funeral food; either way, it meant people going big on the grief-wailing in order to benefit materially, giving people what they want even if it wasn’t true.
CAROLINE CRAMPTON: So placebo had that meaning a long time before, of something pleasing or flattering; but then it was united by this particular research paper in 1920 with this therapeutic placebo effect, this idea that a treatment could be pleasing, it could produce pleasing results, even if it wasn't actually the substance. And then you have the opposite, which was identified about 40 years later, in the 1960s: the nocebo effect, which is the other side of the coin to the placebo effect.
HZ: Don’t get angry at ‘nocebo’ because you think it sounds like it might be a portmanteau - it isn’t, it’s a Latin verb meaning “I shall harm” and was first used as a medical term by Walter Kennedy in 1961, although nocebo research had been happening for a couple of hundred years already, including by Benjamin Franklin, and has been a big research area this century. The nocebo effect is that of negative expectation: same principle as a placebo, but instead of making you feel better, it makes you feel worse.
CAROLINE CRAMPTON: And I think it has a lot to do with the placebo effect, because the same elements of language and medical performance and theatre are all present. But it's specifically targeted at unpleasant or unsought-for effects of medication. A really good example would be where someone is told that there are harmful side effects to the drug that they're taking. If they're told that they're there, they're more likely to experience them. If they're not told that they're there, they're less likely to experience them. There's even advanced effects where if someone is given a harmless saline solution and told that they're being given a drug with powerful side effects, they may well develop said side effects, even though there is nothing about the substance that they've received that should cause them. So the nocebo effect describes the intense power of negative suggestion.
HZ: God damn it.
CAROLINE CRAMPTON: It's absolutely weird. Like, there's this big debate going on in medicine at the moment about whether you should use this - if we can make people feel better with the placebo effect, should we do it? Because apparently, even if you tell someone that it is a placebo effect, they can experience a placebo effect. You don't have to deceive them for it to work. So, there is some discussion about the idea of: if we're being absolutely transparent and honest, maybe it's fine. Maybe it is a useful therapy.
HZ: There are products sold as placebos, like very openly.
CAROLINE CRAMPTON: Yeah, there's this one particular thing I found that's called Zeebo. And it's what they call an open label placebo. So they're very upfront about the fact that it does not contain anything that will do anything to you. I think the pills are just cellulose, so they're like blank pills that you would normally put the active ingredient in, but these are just the blanks. And they don't claim it does anything. You buy it and you decide what you want it to do. You design your own treatment regimen for it. You're like, “I really want to treat my chronic back pain and I'm gonna take my Zeebo morning and night and I'm gonna keep a careful record of how I feel and what it does.”
And, yeah, the idea is that it's harnessing the power of the placebo effect. I think it's the most amazing four-dimensional chess version of wellness that I've ever seen. Because, while part of me goes, “Well, yeah, I mean, you're not deceiving anybody. You're not pretending that you're selling them something that does something and it doesn't, or has an active ingredient and it doesn't. You're being completely honest” - but you are still charging people for it. And somehow I think perhaps the act of paying for it might be what might make it work.
I think it's the relationship of commerce, and that aspect of expectation and theatre and ritual that you're supposed to develop around it, that might actually be what makes it work. Which is very, very dark if purchasing some blank pills can trigger the placebo effect in a positive way, whereas you just deciding, I don't know, that you're going to eat a slice of toast every morning and that's gonna help you - that probably wouldn't work, because you're not buying into like the medical drama of it all.
And I don't think there's really kind of an established consensus either on actually what's happening, what is going on in the brain and the body when the placebo effect is triggered, and also, ethically, what we should be doing about it. But it does seem to be sufficiently well established over enough studies over enough time to say that it does happen and it is a thing that our brains can do.
HZ: 🤯🤯🤯
CAROLINE CRAMPTON: I know.
HZ: And now one last thing from AJ Jacobs.
AJ JACOBS: Well, I talked to this woman who is an expert in medieval riddles written by monks - and you might have studied them.
HZ: They're almost all penises.
AJ JACOBS: Yes, exactly. Well that, but then they claimed it wasn't.
HZ: Yeah, it's penis or Jesus.
AJ JACOBS: Well, there was one I remember I'm gonna paraphrase because I don't have it in front of me, but it was something like “This is a stalk that grows from below, it's hairy down below, and the maiden grabs it and attacks it in its redness and her wet becomes her eye.”
HZ: I remember that one.
AJ JACOBS: You do?
HZ: Yeah, the onion.
AJ JACOBS: The onion, exactly. The monks are like, “What? No that's you! Yo you have your mind in the gutter. We were just writing about an onion.” It was some good plausible deniability.
HZ: Classic japes to end 2024’s Allusionisting. Today you heard from, in order of appearance: historical linguist Joanna Kopaczyk; Juliana Pache, maker of Black Crossword, which I do every evening, my record completion time is 23 seconds; linguist Ben Zimmer; baker Stacey Mei Yan Fong, author of the book 50 Pies, 50 States; writer and puzzle-maker AJ Jacobs of The Puzzler podcast and author of books including The Year of Living Constitutionally: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Constitution's Original Meaning; Zazie Todd, animal behaviour expert and author of books including Wag, Purr, and her latest Bark! The Science of Helping Your Anxious, Fearful, or Reactive Dog; and Caroline Crampton, who makes Shedunnit podcast and writes a great newsletter at carolinecrampton.com, and her latest book is A Body Made of Glass: A Cultural History of Hypochondria. I’ll link to all of them, and the episodes they appeared in this year, at theallusionist.org/bonus2024.
I just appeared on a really lovely podcast, The Podgoblin’s Hat, which is all about the Moomins; and I got to reread the book Moominland Midwinter, which was - I loved it as a child, and rereading it as adult, I was like, “Oh god, I missed so much stuff as a child. This is SO good!” So I recommend the book, and the podcast Podgoblin’s Hat, which you can find in all the pod places.
The Allusionist will be back mid-January 2025 with the show’s TENTH BIRTHDAY EPISODE. To celebrate, for the month running up to it there’s a little discount if you donate on Patreon. If you’d like to chip in, and become a member of the Allusioverse, go to theallusionist.org/donate.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
bine, noun: a long, flexible stem of a climbing plant, especially the hop.
Try using ‘bine’ in an email today.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman, on the unceded ancestral and traditional territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Martin Austwick of the experimental podcast Neutrino Watch composed the music. Find his songs at palebirdmusic.com.
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Find @allusionistshow on Instagram, Facebook, BlueSky and YouTube, and I’m keen to hear what you think after you’ve listened to an episode, so do let me know.
Thanks to everyone who appeared on the show this year, talking about craters on the planet Mercury, and lunar new year homophones, lipreading scandals, queer vocabulary in Arabic, 100-page cryptic puzzles and a whole lot more. You can hear or read every episode, getmore information about the topics and the guests who talk about them, and see the full dictionary entries for the randomly selected words, and keep track of the events that are coming up like livestreams and the 10th birthday live show get your tickets get your tickets now! - and donate to the show and become a member of the Allusioverse - all of it is at the show’s forever home theallusionist.org.
