Original Public Meaning

The phenomenon of time has always puzzled humans. In today's episode, we consider "perpetual," a word that asks us to think about the infinite expanse of time that we all rush forward into. There are some other words relating to movement or stillness—impetus, permanent, momentum, inertia—that come up in our consideration of perpetuity here. We also take a moment to recognize Anne Carson, the celebrated classicist, poet, and translator, who just last week was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her translation of a poem of Catullus considers the perpetual grief of losing a loved one.

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Music: Adapted from Sonatine by Maurice Ravel, performed by Irene Posviatovska (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

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Our era is defined by technological development: artificial intelligence, speedy data connections, the very Internet itself. In this episode, we consider a word at the heart of modern technology: cyber. It's a word with a strange-sounding Greek ancestor (κυβερνήτης), whose widely used derivatives are hiding in plain sight in modern English. "Cyber" is also a welcome opportunity to revisit Patricia Lockwood's 2021 novel No One Is Talking About This, in which the narrator finds herself celebrated in cyberspace in ways that escape her control.

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Music: Adapted from Sonatine by Maurice Ravel, performed by Irene Posviatovska (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

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There are lots of ideas that seem like they shouldn't be true: that one infinity might be larger than another or that mass could somehow be equated with energy. We consider a related concept in today's episode: paradox. Today, a paradox is generally understood as a statement that is self-contradicting or even nonsensical but that nevertheless contains some element of truth. It's a word that comes to us from Greek and its own rich vocabulary surrounding belief and opinion. To close out, we consider a paradox that appears in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. It's a reminder that what seems at first to be a paradox might simply turn out to be wrong.

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Music: Adapted from Sonatine by Maurice Ravel, performed by Irene Posviatovska (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

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We hear a lot about virtue in all kinds of contexts: civic virtue, cardinal virtues, and so on. In today's episode, we look at the roots of "virtue" in the Roman word virtus. It's a word that, at least etymologically speaking, has ties to something like "manliness," but even among our earliest Roman authors, virtus clearly means something different from macho strength. Finally, we look at the essay "Virtue Signaling" but the contemporary writer B. D. McClay. It's a provocative defense of what people sometimes call "virtue signaling," and it reminds us that people generally don't think of virtue simply as a way to show off to other people.

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Music: Adapted from Sonatine by Maurice Ravel, performed by Irene Posviatovska (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

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Onomatopoeia is a phenomenon where words mimic the sounds they denote: fizz, click, meow. It's the idea underlying the word "disgruntle," which has something to do with the noises made by pigs. In this episode, we consider how the grunting of pigs ended up describing dissatisfied and upset people. Finally, we look at a passage from P.G. Wodehouse's The Code of the Woosters that plays with "disgruntled" and its idiosyncratic features in English.

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Music: Adapted from Sonatine by Maurice Ravel, performed by Irene Posviatovska (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

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The English terminology surrounding "pity" comes from Latin—from pietas—but as students of classical Latin know, this word is best translated as "dutifulness" or "loyalty." The development of an ancient word for dutifulness into our contemporary idea of mercy or compassion is a strange story, weaving through Old French and early English and even the Pietà, Michelangelo's masterful sculpture in St. Peter's. Later, we consider the religious and political writer Simone Weil, who wrote an influential essay about Homer's Iliad: "The Iliad, or the Poem of Force."

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Music: Adapted from Sonatine by Maurice Ravel, performed by Irene Posviatovska (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

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Every day, we look for amusement: from our phones, from our friends, from our books. The history of this word surprised me: English lexicographers reject any link with the Muses of the ancient world. Here, we discuss the proposed link between amusement and an Old French word for "face": mus. After our last discussion of "stereotype" in Walter Lippmann, it seems only fair to turn to John Dewey and his The Public and Its Problems, Dewey's response to Lippmann's critique of democratic culture. He warns his readers about the dangers of widely available amusements, a warning that is all the urgent in our era of screens.

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Music: Adapted from Sonatine by Maurice Ravel, performed by Irene Posviatovska (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

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We normally think of stereotypes today as a kind of lazy thinking: they're vicious assumptions about, say, demographic groups or even whole regions of the world. The word comes into English as the combination of two Greek stems that were used around 1800 to describe a new method of printing. This early history of the term "stereotype" in printing practices anticipates its later use by Walter Lippmann, one of the most important media theorists of the twentieth century. In this episode, we consider his landmark 1922 work Public Opinion and its anticipation of today's anxieties about "bespoke realities" and "echo chambers" in our digital lives.

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Music: Adapted from Sonatine by Maurice Ravel, performed by Irene Posviatovska (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

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In the board game Clue, we finish the game by making an accusation about who killed Mr. Boddy, where, and with what. This context of a murder mystery is a good entry point for thinking about the English verb "accuse," which has its roots in the legal system of the ancient Romans. It's a verb that appears in the poem "District and Circle" by the acclaimed Irish poet Seamus Heaney, where a commuter and busking musician exchange glances in the London Underground.

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Music: Adapted from Sonatine by Maurice Ravel, performed by Irene Posviatovska (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

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Originally in its Latin ancestor, the word "complicate" described the folding or turning of physical objects, like letters and knees. But as the word developed in English, complication could denote "folds" outside these physical examples: a psychological conflict or a moral ambivalence, for instance. In today's episode, we consider one of the more famous appearances of this word in modern literature: the opening line of Emily Wilson's celebrated translation of Homer's Odyssey. It's a word that draws out the difficulty of portraying the conflicted, complicated Homeric hero on the silver screen, as we see this summer in Christopher Nolan's new film adaptation of Homer's epic.

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Music: Adapted from Sonatine by Maurice Ravel, performed by Irene Posviatovska (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

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