Allusionist 65. Eponyms III: Who’s That Guy?
So It turns out calling a person guy or saying “you guys” comes from Guy Fawkes.
How Writing Closed Captions Turned Me off TV For Good
Post-MFA, a writer spends time in the captioning trenches
Refresh Your Mind
This week, Manoush’s book - the book that started with you, listeners - hits the shelves. To encourage you to #GetBored and find brilliance, we made a weird earworm. It’s…
The Voynich Manuscript and Truth on the Internet
It can be a little frightening for medievalists to see self-evidently wrongheaded interpretations spread like wood lice.
Technobabble
UK podcast star Helen Zaltzman of The Allusionist helps me figure out why one set of poorly understood pseudo-scientific terms can sink a scene, while another set can make a…
Wet weekend
Rob's weekend has been wet, even though it hasn't rained! What's happened? Feifei's about to find out and learn a new authentic English expression! {listen} Transcript FeifeiHello. I'm Feifei and…
What hunter-gatherer gut microbiomes have that we don’t, and breaking the emoji code
Sarah Crespi talks to Sam Smits about how our microbial passengers differ from one culture to the next—are we losing diversity and the ability to fight chronic disease? For our…
The English We Speak: Not a sausage
Neil and Feifei want to find out about Rob’s new job. But he’s saying absolutely nothing about it. Learn how we can express the idea of ‘absolutely nothing’ with the…
The English We Speak: Donkey’s years
Why has Rob got a donkey in the studio?! It's probably got something with today's authentic English phrase which is about not doing something for a long time. How long…