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13.05.
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The Allusionist
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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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The Allusionist
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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
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08.02.
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The Allusionist
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Allusionist 189. Mouthful of Fortune
At Lunar New Year, certain foods are particularly lucky to eat. Why?
Because in Chinese, their names are puns on fortunate things. Damn, maybe
noodles are all it takes to get me into puns after all... Professor Miranda
Brown, cultural historian of China specialising in food and drink, explains
the wordplay foods of new year, and why names are so resonant in Chinese.
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28.01.
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The Allusionist
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Allusionist 188. Lipread
Lipreading has been in the news this month, thanks to gossip-stoking mouth
movements at the Golden Globes that the amateur lipreaders of The Internet
rushed to interpret. But lipreading tutor Helen Barrow describes how
reading lips really works - the confusable consonants, the importance of
context and body language - and gossip maven Lainey Lui explains why these
regularly occurring lipreading gossip stories are unworthy of a second or
even first glance.
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11.01.
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The Allusionist
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ninth birthdaylusionist
Can you believe, this podcast turns nine years old on 14 January 2024?
The show began five British prime ministers ago! When it began, I was still
struggling to get a bank card without 'Miss' on it!
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24.12.2023
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The Allusionist
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Allusionist 187. Bonus 2023
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.