NK: I definitely wish I would’ve kept a journal in my elementary, junior high and high school years. You know, when you have so many years removed from certain periods of your life, you don’t really remember what it was really like. Your brain eliminates so many memories, you’re only left with specific moments. What a diary gives you is these moments of minutiae, which you managed to write down. The minutiae open up a part of your memory that is more deeply locked away, and allows you to connect to who you were as a kid which your normal memory can’t do.
Read moreAllusionist 23: Criminallusionist - transcript
There’s a tricky linguistic balance to strike in crime journalism. At one end, there is a linguistic style which is so dry and technical it makes the story sound, well, boring, and there’s also some danger of making it seem detached from the real damage it caused to people. At the other end of the scale, there’s crime reporting that is as splashy and sensational as fiction.
Read moreAllusionist 22: Vocables - transcript
In normal speech, vocables perform various functions - for instance, 'um' and 'ah' buy us time to think, and paper over cracks in our phrases; and babies testing out their vocal cords tend to be pretty keen on the vocables. Not sure they have a wealth of alternatives at that stage, to be honest. So in speech, vocables aren’t meaningful, or consequential, or even intentional - but in song, they can be all these things. All those la la las and dum di dums and bom bom do be de doos are ubiquitous in songs - so what are they doing there?
Read moreAllusionist 21: Eponyms I: The Ballad of Bic and Biro
JW: László Bíró would hear people say the ballpoint was ruining writing skills, and he’d smile and say, “Well, if writing comes from the heart, if we can help the hand to perform the hand to perform the task, what’s so wrong with that?” And I think there’s nothing wrong with that. Well done László Bíró.
HZ: I think it’s also interesting that Bíró and Bic's names are on products that are hugely successful, but rarely the centre of attention - and also disposable.
JW: Yeah. And also they are kind of disposable, in that you can know what a Bic or a Biro is, but you don’t need to know who Marcel is or who László is. They’ve made this disposable contribution to history, and in the same way made themselves disposable.
Allusionist 20: Baby Talk - transcript
[baby voice] Wook at your widdle face. Who’s a cutie pie? Who’s a cutie pie? Here comes the aeroplane - [cough] [/baby voice]
When you’re talking to a baby, it’s hard to maintain dignity. In fact even the baby, who can’t talk, thinks jigsaws are for eating, and is probably sitting in its own effluvium, is more dignified than you at that point.
But, good news! All those stupid voices, and banal rhetorical questions, are helping the baby to learn language.
Read moreAllusionist 19: Architecting About Dance - transcript
“Talking about music is like dancing about architecture,” said Elvis Costello. Or Frank Zappa. Or Gore Vidal. Or Laurie Anderson. Or Steve Martin. Or the comedian Martin Mull.
I think this is a problematic statement, not just because nobody can agree on who came up with it. But because dancing about architecture doesn’t seem particularly far-fetched - they’re both visual, in fact each medium could probably elegantly reflect the other. Talking about dance, however, is really difficult.
Read moreAllusionist 18: Fix, part II - transcript
HC: We ended up discovering that there is a whole other group of English speakers you don’t normally think of. It’s a very small group; they speak a very strange version of English; and they’re some of the most powerful people on the planet. They probably directly influence your lives. And they speak a strange pidgin of English, known as Euro English, or Euro Speak.
HZ: Who are ‘they’? European Union officials.
HC: Euro English is the English spoken by technocrats at the EU. Most of them don’t speak English as a first language, so what’s happened is they’ve kind of misappropriated English words and misunderstood what they mean, or invented new words.
Read moreAllusionist 17: Fix, part I - transcript
Most of the questions I get asked about the English language can be boiled down to this: why is English such an idiosyncratic mess? And why has nobody tried to sort it out?
Well, some people did kind of try. For hundreds of years, English had been a swirling concoction full of Latin, German and French thanks to all the invasions of Britain, plus words English had nicked from other languages, all refusing to behave regularly or obey rules consistently, and riddled with silent Gs.
300 or so years ago, some decided they had HAD ENOUGH.
Allusionist 16: Word Play - transcript
LESLIE SCOTT: Not many people realise the success of Scrabble is based on a statistician figuring out the scoring system - it's the first time someone had a word game where the score of the word game was based on him researching very thoroughly the number of times a particular letter was used. He scoured the New York Times for years counting how many times an E comes up, a Z, etc. Hence the numbers of those letters in the stack to start with was based on this, as is the scoring. And it works, whether or not you like the game. We have a mathematician to thank.
HZ: Probably why it’s not fun.
HZ: Sorry, Scrabble. But a game where you can triumph just by memorizing every two letter word will never have my affection.
Read moreAllusionist 15: Step Away - transcript
Since 'step-' indicates the biological and possibly emotional distance between relations, I had assumed that etymologically, that was where the term originated - the idea of someone being a step away from the family. But step the family word, and step as in to tread, have totally different roots - and very different meanings.
Read moreAllusionist 14: Behave - transcript
Thanks to your own brain, words have the capacity to become your worst enemy.
JG: it could just be a random word, something attached to something you know, or something that you happened to be thinking at the time you were feeling awful so it became the word that means something bad.
HZ: No words are safe.
JG: No! Because that part of our mind just mashes things together in different ways, and if it mashes two things together at a time when you’re feeling a certain way, that connection sticks, which is where the therapy comes in - unsticking those things.
Allusionist 13: Mixed Emojions - transcript
Emoji - the 'e' means picture, 'moji', letter in Japanese - seem like a very modern phenomenon, dependent on the proliferation of mobile phones. But they have precedent in language far more ancient than our own. A picture per concept is pretty much what the ancient Sumerians were using to communicate some 5,500 years ago when they came up with the cuneiform writing system.
Read moreAllusionist 12: Pride - transcript
New York City in 1970. Homosexuality was still classified as a mental illness; gay sex was punishable with fines and prison sentences. A police raid on the Stonewall Inn on Christopher St on 28th June 1969 sparked the Stonewall Riots, after which the gay civil rights movement was gathering momentum, and pride began to mean something more.
CS: My name is Craig Schoonmaker, and in 1970 I authored the word ‘pride’ for gay pride. Somebody had to come up with it!
We had a committee to commemorate the Stonewall riots. We were going to create a number of events the same weekend as the march to bring in people out of town, and wanted to unite the events under a label. First thought was ‘Gay Power’. I didn’t like that, so proposed gay pride.
There’s very little chance for people in the world to have power, but anyone can have pride.
Allusionist 11: Brunchtime - transcript
Motel. Email. Chocoholic. Labradoodle. Fanzine. Tanzania. Jazzercise. Breathalyzer. Televangelist. Chillax. Smog. Bromance. Velcro. Brangelina. Chrismukkah. Podcast. Jorts.
Modern English is awash with portmanteau terms, words formed from two or more words spliced together. The word ‘Portmanteau’, meaning a piece of luggage, is itself a portmanteau word from the 16th century, uniting the French words ‘porter’, meaning ‘to carry’, and ‘manteau’, meaning cloak. But credit for the Frankenword sense of 'portmanteau' goes to Lewis Carroll, in Alice Through The Looking Glass. Alice asks Humpty Dumpty to help her make sense of the Jabberwocky poem, full of portmanteaus like slithy, mimsy, galumph and chortle. “You see it's like a portmanteau,” says Humpty Dumpty, “there are two meanings packed up into one word.”
Today, I want to unpack one particular portmanteau, and that portmanteau is 'brunch'.
Read moreAllusionist 10: Election Lexicon - transcript
This episode comes out the day before the 2015 General Election in the UK, so please join me for a jaunt through the etymology of some of the words that are the linguistic flies buzzing around the carcase of democracy.
Read more