The Allusionist
Linguistic adventures with Helen Zaltzman, TheAllusionist.org.
A proud member of Radiotopia from PRX. Learn more at radiotopia.fm.
- Website
- http://theallusionist.org
- Description
- Linguistic adventures with Helen Zaltzman, TheAllusionist.org. A proud member of Radiotopia from PRX. Learn more at radiotopia.fm.
- Support
- Support the show
- Language
- 🇬🇧 English
- last modified
- 2024-04-09 17:41
- last episode published
- 2024-04-09 07:18
- publication frequency
- 15.98 days
- Contributors
- The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX
- Owner
- Helen Zaltzman
- Author
- Explicit
- false
- Number of Episodes
- 212
- Rss-Feeds
- Detail page
- Categories
- Arts
Recommendations
Episodes
| Date | Title & Description | Contributors |
|---|---|---|
| 2024-04-09 | This episode, and the next couple of episodes, are about word games! Today, Joshua Blackburn recounts how his sons' uninspiring English homework led to him inventing the language quiz game League of the Lexicon; and Kathryn Hymes and Hakan Seyalıoğlu o... |
|
| 2024-03-23 | The word 'hypochondria' has travelled from meaning physical ailments in a particular region of your body, to ones that are only in your mind. It has been in fashion, and thoroughly out; it has been subject to a range of treatments; it has been lucrativ... |
|
| 2024-03-11 | "It's quite a big undertaking going through every named feature in the whole solar system and trying to find out who that person was." When PhD student Annie Lennox discovered a crater on Mercury, she got the chance to name it. Which sent her on a bigg... |
|
| 2024-02-26 | 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 i... |
|
| 2024-02-10 | 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 Chin... |
|
| 2024-01-28 | 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 c... |
|
| 2023-12-24 | 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 m... |
|
| 2023-12-12 | 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, espionage, scandals - and socks, lots of socks. Fibre artist and Yarn Stories podcaster Miriam Felton discusses why ... |
|
| 2023-11-20 | 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 s... |
|
| 2023-11-06 | The word 'misophonia' describes a condition that statistically, 20 per cent of you have: an extreme reaction to certain sounds. "For me, it was a relief to have a word for what I'd been experiencing," says Dr Jane Gregory, author of the new book Sounds... |
|