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 much more.
Read moreAllusionist 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.
Read moreThe Allusionist is currently on tour in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand
Come to see the new live show Your Name Here, all about eponyms! It’s 90 minutes of wordy musical joy.
Two dates remain in Australia - Adelaide on 21 July and Sydney 27 July - then we’re in Aotearoa New Zealand in August. Get tickets at theallusionist.org/events.
Also! Everyone who comes to see the new live show Your Name Here gets a 'Problematic Eponym of the Future' pencil to draft their own eponym with:
Tranquillusionist: Australia's Big Things
This is the Tranquillusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, say a load of deliberately boring words to distract your interior monologue from whatever dystopian stew it is in. Today: a list of the Big Things of Australia.
Read moreAllusionist 128. Bonus 2020
To round off the year, here are some choice cuts from the Allusionist vault of interesting things that guests said that there wasn’t room for in the original episodes. Brace yourself for a vivid name for dust bunnies, the scary side of glamour, another reason to be grateful for bears, and Schrödinger’s Fart.
Read moreAllusionist 126. Survival: Custodians of the Languages
In Australia, there were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of languages. Until English arrived.
Read more
