Author: Helen Zaltzman

“It’s sort of frozen body language; that’s what handwriting analysis is about.”

Since it caught on a couple of hundred years ago, graphology – analysing handwriting to deduce characteristics of the writer – has struggled to be taken seriously as a practice. But undoubtedly, there are things about ourselves that we can’t help but reveal in our handwriting. Graphologist Adam Brand explains the ‘pseudoscience/useful art’.

For more about this episode, visit http://theallusionist.org/graphology.

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They look like numbers. They sound like numbers. You kinda know they are numbers. But they’re not actually numbers. Linguistic anthropologist Stephen Chrisomalis explains what’s going on with indefinite hyperbolic numerals like ‘zillion’, ‘squillion’ and ‘kajillion’.

For more about this episode, visit http://theallusionist.org/zillions.

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Translation, A Love Story:

Translator listens to The Allusionist. Translator hears about the podcast The Memory Palace. Translator listens to The Memory Palace. Translator immediately becomes smitten with The Memory Palace. Translator translates The Memory Palace from English to Brazilian Portuguese, and turns it into a book – O Palácio da Memória – which will be published in Brazil two weeks hence.

But, like any love story, it’s not quite that simple.

Literary translator Caetano Galindo recounts the trials and treats of turning Nate DiMeo’s English language audio into Brazilian Portuguese text.

Find out more about this episode at http://theallusionist.org/translation, and hear The Memory Palace at http://thememorypalace.us.

The Allusionist is on a break during July. There’ll be a new episode out on 4 August; meanwhile, stay in touch at http://twitter.com/allusionistshow and http://facebook.com/allusionistshow. And come to see the live show at the London Podcast Festival in September.

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It’s August 2007. Lauren Marks is a 27-year-old actor and a PhD student, spending the month directing a play at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. She’s in a bar, standing onstage, performing a karaoke duet of ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’…and then a blood vessel in her brain bursts. When she wakes up in hospital, days later, she has no internal monologue, and a vocabulary of only forty words.

Find out more about this episode at http://theallusionist.org/eclipse, and more about Lauren at http://astitchoftime.com.

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There’s a small matter I trip over regularly in the Allusionist:
Dates.
Not the fruit.

Specicially, the terms BC and AD, Before Christ and Anno Domini (‘the year of the Lord’ (‘the Lord’ also being Christ)). How did Jesus Christ get to be all up in our system of counting the years?

There’s more about the episode at http://theallusionist.org/abdc. 

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As discussed in episode 51, Under the Covers part II, the vocabulary for sex and associated body parts is tricky to navigate in many ways – but even more so if you are trans or gender non-binary.

CONTENT NOTE: this episode contains strong language and frank discussions of sex and bodies.

There’s more about the episode at http://theallusionist.org/joins.

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“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” Hrishikesh Hirway of Song Exploder wants people to stop saying ‘namaste’ after a yoga session.

There’s more about this episode at http://theallusionist.org/namaste.

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“Sometimes you want to make the dictionary sexy but it’s just not a sexy thing,” says Kory Stamper, lexicographer for the Merriam-Webster dictionaries. Sorry if this is disillusioning news for you. The dictionary is not a sexy thing, but as Kory explains, it is a fascinating, complicated, exacting thing.

There’s more about this episode at http://theallusionist.org/authority.

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“Recognizing someone’s humanity is crucial. Calling someone a migrant, calling someone an asylum seeker, calling them a refugee: these are official categories. But in many ways, depending on how they use them, they can change and become more negative.”

So says propaganda and migration specialist Emma Briant, as she explains the dangers of conflating and misusing terms like ‘refugee’ and ‘asylum seeker’, while British/Asian/but-kinda-not author Nikesh Shukla wonders where he’s from – where he is really from.

There’s more about this episode at http://theallusionist.org/migration.

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Sometimes words can become your worst enemy. Clinical psychologist Jane Gregory tells how to defuse their power. There’s more about this episode at http://theallusionist.org/behave-rerun.

The main part of this episode is a rerun, but there’s new material as well – get ready for a thrill-ride into medieval accounting technology.

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