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Linguistic adventures with Helen Zaltzman, TheAllusionist.org. A proud member of Radiotopia from PRX. Learn more at radiotopia.fm.
"The word ‘suburbia’ sort of evokes a very fixed idea of a place that is identikit, that all suburbs are the same, that within the suburb ev...
You know what's an absolutely pesky kind of word to define in a dictionary? Colour names. A passel of lexicographers spent years - decades,...
Pack your oxygen tank, we're going to space. There’s a lot of etymology up there. Visit theallusionist.org/cosmic-hairball for more informat...
It's the annual parade of Bonus Bits! Every year, the show's guests say too many interesting things and/or stuff that isn't languagey enough...
Today, we read the novelisation of The Muppet Christmas Carol, also known as the 1843 festive lit hit A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens....
"I have never felt so naked. That's how exposed I felt at the idea that my handwriting was going to be seen by the world," says Tim Brookes,...
“The more we look into social structures, the more many of us realize we don't fit into them," says So Mayer, author of the new book Bad Lan...
A change of scene for one episode: recently the brilliant poet and performer Molly Naylor interviewed me for her podcast Making Trouble, abo...
It's Banned Books Week. Honorary youth chair Iris Mogul and Sam Helmick, president of the American Library Association, talk about what it i...
In their heyday of the 1970s and 1980s, there were more than 200 - possibly more than 400 - feminist restaurants and coffee shops in the USA...
Watching the film Legally Blonde one day with the subtitles on, numerous perfectly innocuous words were partially asterisked out, because of...
Listener Erica commented: "Perhaps an idea for a bonus ep of Four Letter Word season would be one on two-letter words: there’s an establishe...
For today’s instalment of Four Letter Word season, we’re hopping from ‘bane’ to ‘bain’ to ‘bath’, via poison gardens, doll’s eyes, alchemist...
The latest four letter word of Four Letter Word season is dino. 'Dinosaur' is derived from Greek 'terrible lizard', and they could have call...
Get in, winner: we're going on a field trip. We're spending the day in five of Vancouver's city parks with Justin McElroy, Municipal Affairs...
The other day was the 53rd anniversary of the break-in at the Watergate Hotel, which not only caused a lot of political uproar, it had a big...
Four Letter Word season continues with a quiz (which is a four-letter word itself) about four letter words. Test your etymological knowledge...
Ten years ago, on the fourth episode of the show, I investigated why the C-word is considered a worse swear than the others. Since then - we...
Welcome to Four Letter Word season! We're kicking off with one of the most versatile words: it can be a noun, verb, punctuation, expostulati...
Happy tenth birthday to this show! To celebrate, here's every randomly selected word from the dictionary from the first decade of the show....
It's the annual parade of Bonus Bits - things this year's guests said that I couldn't fit into their episodes, and/or weren't about language...
In Lexicat part 1, we met the author Mary Robinette Kowal and her cat Elsie, and learned about how they communicate via a set of buttons pro...
Elsie the cat has a set of 120 buttons programmed with words. She uses them to lie, swear, apologise, express grief and frustration and love...
In 15th and 16th century Scotland, in the highest courts of the land, you'd find esteemed poets hurling insults at each other. This was flyt...
There's so much more to say about Singlish after last episode that we're saying some more of it this episode. Poet and academic Gwee Li Sui,...
"If you grow up being told that one of your first languages, Singlish, is actually a bad version of an already existing language, you kind o...
This is the Tranquillusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, give your brain a break by temporarily supplanting your interior monologue with w...
I can scarce believe that I've made 200 episodes of this show, but here we are! To celebrate, here is a quiz about language where all the qu...
Next episode is the 200th, therefore this is the 199th. I raid the 66 pages of ideas for episodes I have been keeping for nearly a decade, a...
Since 2019, Marwan Kaabour has been collecting Arabic slang words used by and about queer people, first for the online community Takweer, an...
At the Scripps National Spelling Bee, behind the spectacle of kids vying to be champion spellers, a whole lot of work goes on to make words...
I went to the 2024 Scripps National Spelling Bee, to marvel at kids spelling words I had mostly never even heard of. But when you’re at Bee...
Cain's Jawbone, a murder mystery cryptic puzzle novella in the form of 100 pages presented in the wrong order, has many millions of possible...
Exciting things have been happening with crossword puzzles in the US: more constructors, more outlets to get puzzles published, clues and an...
AJ Jacobs makes The Puzzler podcast, wrote The Puzzler book, and sometimes turns his whole life into a puzzle. He comes bearing word games,...
This episode, and the next couple of episodes, are about word games! Today, Joshua Blackburn recounts how his sons' uninspiring English home...
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'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...
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...
At Lunar New Year, certain foods are particularly lucky to eat. Why? Because in Chinese, their names are puns on fortunate things. Damn, may...
Lipreading has been in the news this month, thanks to gossip-stoking mouth movements at the Golden Globes that the amateur lipreaders of The...
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,...
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, espi...
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...
The word 'misophonia' describes a condition that statistically, 20 per cent of you have: an extreme reaction to certain sounds. "For me, it...
All aboard, we're off to the 2023 Apple Festival at the University of British Columbia, to taste some apples and, most importantly, enjoy so...
When Spanish missionaries arrived in what is now called Florida, there were 100,000-200,000 Timucua people in the region. Just two centuries...
Lexicographer, author and Dictionary Corner resident Susie Dent has been studying words to make us feel happy. She brings etymologies concer...
There's an abiding myth that the landmark dictionaries are the work of one man, in a dusty paper-filled garrett tirelessly working away sing...
Sterling Martin was in grad school, studying C. elegans worms, when COVID19 hit and suddenly he found himself in lexicography, as part of a...