Empathy and kindness can be noble concepts in themselves, but as terms are thrown around enough to have become buzzwords, and in the process lose some of their meaning and purpose. Audiomakers Sandhya Dirks and Julia Furlan, and academic and podcaster Hannah McGregor, discuss the value and pitfalls of appealing to the emotions. Find out more about this episode and get extra information about the topics therein at theallusionist.org/sentiment, where there's also a transcript. The Allusionist's online home is theallusionist.org. Stay in touch at twitter.com/allusionistshow, facebook.com/allusionistshow and instagram.com/allusionistshow. The Allusionist is produced by me, Helen Zaltzman. The music is by …
Tags: english, words, helen, zaltzman, prx, radiotopia, etymology, language
Older Episodes
“Anxiety is the parrot sidekick that rides on my shoulder and occasionally squawks warnings in my ear,” says Tim Clare, poet and podcaster and author of the book _Coward: Why We Get Anxious & What We Can Do About It_. We talk about anxiety, cowardice, magic bullets vs silver bullets, …
Grab your stake and crucifix pendant, we're going vampire-hunting! Well, vampire-etymology-hunting. The podcast Buffering the Vampire Slayer, which recaps the TV show _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_ episode by episode, invited me to answer their listeners' questions of language that the show had provoked. Together with BVTS hosts Kristin Russo and …
There's lots of fun etymology of creatures and a lot of fun etymology derived from creatures, and now it is gathered into this fun playalong quiz about animal etymologies! There's an interactive answer sheet at [theallusionist.org/creaturequiz](http://theallusionist.org/creaturequiz), plus more information about various animals and etymologies, and as always the full dictionary …
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. The Allusionist is on tour in Australia with the new live show Your …
The term 'queerbaiting' has evolved from meaning entrapment to marketing ploy to drawing "queer audiences into a piece of media that has no intention of actually meaningfully exploring queerness" says Leigh Pfeffer, host and producer of the podcast History Is Gay. Leigh tracks where the word's various incarnations came from, …
From whitewash (the paint) we got whitewashing (the covering up of misdeeds) and from there greenwashing, redwashing, bluewashing, purplewashing, pinkwashing - and now rainbow washing, where companies will put Pride flags all over products and posts during the month of June, but behind the scenes will not necessarily be useful …
The name Tiffany has been around for some 800 years. But you can't name a character in a historical novel 'Tiffany', because people don't believe the name is old. Science fiction and fantasy author Jo Walton coined the term "The Tiffany Problem" to express the disparity between historical facts and …
Couple of easy straightforward questions for us to chew on: 1. What is 'objectivity' supposed to mean? And 2. does it exist? **Lewis Raven Wallace** , a journalist and audiomaker [fired from his public radio job](https://medium.com/@lewispants/i-was-fired-from-my-journalism-job-ten- days-into-trump-c3bc014ce51d) over his blog post entitled '[Objectivity is dead and I'm okay with it](https://medium.com/@lewispants/objectivity-is-dead- …
Chinese is one of the oldest still-spoken languages in the world. But when technologies arrived like telegraphy and computing, designed with the Roman alphabet in mind, if Chinese wanted to be able to participate then it had to choose between adapting, or paying a heavy price. And sometimes both were …
Hans Asperger would have been merely "a footnote in the history of autism", so why did he get to be the eponym in Asperger's syndrome? Because along with the usual problems medical eponyms pose, and his work not really earning him the honour, he collaborated with Nazis and sent children …
Hans Asperger would have been merely "a footnote in the history of autism", so why did he get to be the eponym in Asperger's syndrome? Because along with the usual problems medical eponyms pose, and his work not really earning him the honour, he collaborated with Nazis and sent children …
Bad hats, cat's pyjamas, banting, goops, creatures, and playing possum - what WERE people going on about during the Golden Age of detective fiction? Caroline Crampton of [Shedunnit podcast](shedunnitshow.com) and I get sleuthing into the slang of the mystery novels of the 1920s and 1930s. Find out more information about …
"Warning: read and keep," says the piece of paper inside Kinder Surprise Eggs, in 34 languages; yet most people do neither thing. But sociologist Keith Kahn- Harris did read and keep it, and study what the egg is trying to tell us: about Kinder Egg toy safety, yes, but also …
Complex PTSD is different to PTSD, but there's not that much understanding of it as its own condition - which was not much help to Stephanie Foo when she was diagnosed with it in 2018. We talk about facing trauma rather than burying it, self-care and self-soothing, endurance being an …
I've been saving them up all year, and now it's time for the annual selection box of Bonus Bits! Things this year's guests said that couldn't fit into their episode, or weren't related to language, but ARE related to being a bonus bit. We've got percussive pan protests; the mating …
"It's really good if we can get the changes through here - that can be an inspiration for other other countries or other places in the world," says Þorbjorg Þorvaldsdottir, chair of [Samtokin '78](https://samtokin78.is/english/), the national queer organization of Iceland. In 2019, Iceland passed the Gender Autonomy Act, which added …
The Icelandic language has remained so stable over the centuries, speakers can read manuscripts from 900 years ago without too much trouble. And when they need a new word for more recent concepts, there are committees to coin one, so that the modern Icelandic lexicon includes such things as the …
When you're trans and pregnant, some of the vocabulary of pregnancy, birth and parenting might not fit you. In fact, some of it might not even work for people of ANY gender. Trans parents Freddy McConnell and CJ talk about gender- additive language, inclusive for women _and_ other genders, and …
The word 'asexual' has been used by humans describing themselves for several decades; 'aromantic' is newer. Both words enable people to voice identities that were unacknowledged for centuries, to find each other and build communities together, and to provide counternarratives to what the allosexuals are pushing. Lewis Brown, a writer …