127. A Festive Hit for 2020

The Allusionist

Helen Zaltzman

Arts, Education, Words, Linguistics, History, Entertainment, Helen Zaltzman, Etymology, Society & Culture

4.7 • 3.8K Ratings

🗓️ 14 December 2020

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The usual canon of Christmas songs may not really fit people's moods in this year 2020, when I'm not sure a lot of us are feeling all that holly jolly. So I drafted in singer and songwriter Jenny Owen Youngs and we wrote a festive song that is suitable for 2020. Content note: there are swears. Several of them.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the illusionist in which I Helen Salzman decked the halls with boughs of language.
0:09.0	Follalalalala language.
0:12.0	In today's episode we're getting festive.
0:14.0	Well festive for 2020.
0:16.0	Content note swears.
0:19.0	On with the show.
0:21.0	This time last year.
0:28.0	December 2019.
0:30.0	I was finishing up touring the illusionist's live show No Title around Canada and the USA.
0:35.0	The last stretch was a 2000 mile drive via some of the western USA's most charming, small
0:40.3	performance venues and geological spectacles.
0:43.3	And that allowed for a lot of time listening to car radio.
0:46.0	And these stations were blasting out the Christmas hits.
0:49.0	It's a pretty different selection in the US to the UK.
0:52.0	And after enough of looping, gently meaningless mid-20th century, Holly Jolly Jingle Jolly
0:57.2	Chestnuts.
0:58.2	I started to wonder if they were deliberately trying to hypnotise me into Christmas obedience.
1:04.0	Luckily my illusion brain was able to override that programming and started thinking about which
1:09.8	are the most frequently used words in festive hits.
1:13.0	So I set the illusionist elves onto the task of analysing a corpus of the most played Christmas
1:18.6	hits in the US and UK.
1:20.6	Filtering out common words such as and of two.
	...

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