150. The Egg's Warning
The Allusionist
Helen Zaltzman
4.7 • 3.8K Ratings
🗓️ 5 March 2022
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
"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 about multilingualism, about an object that says 'yes!' but the warning says 'no!', about the signs of human idiosyncracy that show themselves even in a mandatory corporate message.
Find out more information about the topics in this episode at theallusionist.org/kinderegg, plus a transcript and the full dictionary entry for the randomly selected word.
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The music is by Martin Austwick, made with Kinder Eggs. Hear Martin’s own songs via palebirdmusic.com.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the illusionist in which I, Helen Zoltzman, put on my language suit, climb into |
| 0:09.2 | the language reveal and head out to clean up this city by rubbing extraneous apostrophes |
| 0:13.8 | of chalkboards. This episode is about a warning, a dire warning, don't ignore the warning, |
| 0:19.1 | don't throw away the warning without looking at it out. |
| 0:21.6 | Too late, 12th. The warning tried. By the way, if you want to know more about the making |
| 0:27.2 | of these episodes and to spend more time with your fellow illusioniers as they have dubbed |
| 0:31.5 | themselves, Patreonize the show at patreon.com slash illusionist and you get exclusive |
| 0:38.0 | live streams behind the scenes intel and a discord community which is a nice place to |
| 0:43.2 | hang out together. |
| 0:44.8 | Before we begin, I just need to state that this podcast is not affiliated with or sponsored |
| 0:49.3 | by Ferreiro or Kinda Surprise Eggs on with the show. |
| 1:00.7 | So let's explain what a Kinda Surprise Egg in the first place. |
| 1:02.9 | Yeah, it's slightly bigger than a hen's egg. |
| 1:05.2 | It's a foil wrapped chocolate egg and it has an outer chocolate layer. |
| 1:10.8 | I'm going to open it, I'm peeling off the foil which is white and orange and then we have |
| 1:17.9 | the chocolate egg in two parts. |
| 1:20.2 | Trying to split it without too much incident and then inside that is a yellow capsule. |
| 1:26.4 | Yeah, the yellow being significant. |
| 1:28.5 | Is it? |
| 1:29.5 | It's the yolk. |
| 1:30.5 | I never thought about that before Keith. What have I been doing with my entire life? |
| 1:34.9 | I know, your whole life has been wasted. |
... |
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