The Allusionist
- Category
- Narrative
- Publisher
- Helen Zaltzman
- Language
- English
The Allusionist is Helen Zaltzman’s show about language as a trail of arguments: who named something, who was left out of the dictionary, which joke is doing legal work.
Episodes are tightly written. A linguist, a historian, or a person living inside a word gets the microphone, and Zaltzman keeps the through-line short enough to finish on a walk.
It belongs with narrative shows because a word’s history is told as a story, not as a list of roots. You come for a curiosity and leave with a fight that happened in 1740.
The episodes are independent. Pick one whose title is a single word you thought you understood.
Last episode listed in the official feed
234. No Names
Read from the publisher’s RSS on Oct 3, 2026 · Sep 22, 2026 ET. Audio is not hosted here.
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