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30.06.
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The Allusionist
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Allusionist 197. Word Play 7: Word Sport
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 into this
word sport.
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10.06.
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The Allusionist
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Allusionist 196. Word Play 6: Beeing
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
Week, the competitive spelling is merely the tip of the icebee.
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02.06.
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The Allusionist
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Pride playlist
Hello! Here’s a playlist of episodes of the show that are good to listen to for Pride month, but also at any time, because they are some of the most interesting and complex language matters that I’ve covered in the show:Many Ways At Once. The Scots language didn’t have much of an LGBTQ+ lexicon. So writer and performer Dr Harry Josephine Giles decided to create one.
Polari was a secret language that was used mostly by gay men in London. And now lives on in the
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28.05.
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The Allusionist
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Allusionist 195. Word Play 5: 100 Pages of Solvitude
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 solutions
but only one that is correct. 86 years after it was published, writer,
comedian and crossword constructor John Finnemore solved it. And then,
craving another 100-page cryptic puzzle murder story, he wrote his own.
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13.05.
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Allusionist 194. Word Play part 4: Good Grids
Exciting things have been happening with crossword puzzles in the US: more
constructors, more outlets to get puzzles published, clues and answers that
would never have appeared even a few years ago, and puzzle packs raising a
whole lot of money for charities and humanitarian causes.
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23.04.
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The Allusionist
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Allusionist 193. Word Play 3: Lemon Demon
AJ Jacobs makes The Puzzler podcast, wrote The Puzzler book, and sometimes
turns his whole life into a puzzle. He comes bearing word games,
explanations of anagrams being used to precipitate wars and were key
evidence in trials, tips for writing with a quill, below-the-knee insults,
and tales of living constitutionally.
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09.04.
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The Allusionist
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Allusionist 192: Word Play part 2
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 of Thorny Games explain how they make topics
like language loss and deciphering alien language into creative play.
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24.03.
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Allusionist 191. Hypochondria
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 lucrative for quacks; and it's a very
understandable form of anxiety - which I have, and so does Caroline
Crampton, author of the new book A Body Made of Glass: A History of
Hypochondria.
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07.03.
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The Allusionist
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Allusionist 190: Craters
"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 bigger space mission.
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23.02.
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The Allusionist
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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. This isn’t like the usual episodes
of the Allusionist, there’ll be no learning, no journey, you don’t have to
feel or think anything. And you’ll find previous editions of the
Tranquillusionist at theallusionist.org/tranquillusionist, f