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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 non-secret lexicon - you m
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27.05.
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The Allusionist
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Allusionist 177. Fat part 2
“The starting point is, and the research questions are all framed by: 'We
know it's terrible to be fat, but how terrible is it?' Not: 'What would it
take to give effective healthcare to fat people?'” says Aubrey Gordon,
writer of the new book You Just need to Lose Weight and 19 Other Myths
About Fat People, star of the documentary Your Fat Friend, and podcaster of
Maintenance Phase. And it's not just healthcare where the alignment of
'fat' with 'unhealthy' - and 'thinner' with 'healthier'
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12.05.
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The Allusionist
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Allusionist 176. Fat part 1
It should just be an accurate descriptor of my body, but the word 'fat' has
shaped so much more of my life, and our society. "There is this whole set
of baggage that we are all culturally bringing to this word all the time,"
says Aubrey Gordon, writer of the new book You Just need to Lose Weight and
19 Other Myths About Fat People, star of the documentary Your Fat Friend,
and podcaster of Maintenance Phase.
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22.04.
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The Allusionist
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Allusionist 175. Eurovision part 2
Oh, you thought the Eurovision Song Contest was about songs? Or a fun
international TV event that brings people together in lots of different
countries? Or watching extremely vigorous dance numbers? OK, it is, but
it's also about some pretty thorny language-related politics. Historian
Dean Vuletic, author of Postwar Europe and the Eurovision Song Contest,
discusses Eurovision's many linguistic controversies, and the ways the
contest has been exploited politically - and caused political kic
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07.04.
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The Allusionist
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Allusionist 174. Eurovision part 1
There aren't many multilingual, multinational television shows that have
been running for nearly seven decades. But what makes the Eurovision Song
Contest so special to me is not the music, or the dancing, or the costumes
that range from spangletastic to tear-off: no, it's the people butting
heads about language. Historian Dean Vuletic, author of Postwar Europe and
the Eurovision Song Contest, recounts the many changes in Eurovision's
language rules, and its language hopes and dreams.
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24.03.
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The Allusionist
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Allusionist 173. Death
"You can't redead the dead by you saying something shit," says Cariad Lloyd
of Griefcast and author of You Are Not Alone; nevertheless when you're
bereaved, people still are usually so nervous to say the wrong thing that
they often don't say anything at all. And especially not the word 'dead'.
Maybe what we need, says council funeral officer Evie King, author of
Ashes To Admin, is a "jazzy snazzy term for death, the 'bottomless brunch'
of death..."
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10.03.
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The Allusionist
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Allusionist 172. A Brief History of Brazilian Portuguese
"The myths, or the received wisdom, about Portuguese language in Brazil is
that, of course we know we speak a very different version of the language,
but this has always been explained to us as maybe perhaps a defect of
sorts?" says linguist and translator Caetano Galindo, author of Latim em Pó
, a history of Brazilian Portuguese. "You look deeper into things and you
find you have to wrap your mind around a very different reality.”
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24.02.
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The Allusionist
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Allusionist 171. Supplantation
Last episode, I mentioned that in London, Ontario, in 2019 a 9-year-old
named Lyla Wheeler had launched a petition to rename her street, currently
called Plantation Road. This episode, Lyla, now aged nearly thirteen, and
her mom Kristin Daley recount the reasons why Lyla campaigned for this name
change, how the neighbours reacted, what happened when the wider world
heard about it, and why the street's name is still Plantation Road.
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09.02.
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The Allusionist
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Allusionist 170. Actively Passive
Over the past few years, numerous products and places with the word
'plantation' in their names have rebranded. As for the word 'plantation'
itself, architect and writer Kennedy Whiters of unRedactTheFacts.com
advocates for replacing it with a more truthful term. She also watches out
for use of the grammatical passive voice, because "It hides who did what to
whom."
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27.01.
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The Allusionist
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Allusionist 169. The Box
Erwin Schrödinger is one of the "fathers of quantum mechanics". He also
sexually abused children. Trinity College Dublin recently denamed a lecture
theatre that had been named after him - but his name is still on an
equation that won the Nobel Prize for physics. And a cat.
Writer and historian Subhadra Das recounts how and why you rename a
university building, and retired physicist Martin Austwick considers that
renaming an eponymous equation or theory might be more difficult than
unscrew