Original Public Meaning

Ancient philosophical thought retains an enormous influence on our own contemporary worldview. Today's word—"aesthetic"—draws from that very tradition. We might think of "aesthetics" as a branch of philosophy concerned with the evaluation of art, and even more fundamentally, the word itself raises important questions about what we know anything and how we can know it. To help us think through these difficult philosophical problems, we consider a passage from Albert Murray's The Omni-Americans and its criticism of twentieth-century social scientists.

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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 Greeks and Romans have left behind so much: not just literature, but roads, vases, statues, and buildings. In today's episode, we use this "material culture" of the ancient world as an entry point for thinking about the word "opulent," which itself draws on a multiple words from Latin. To think through the notion of opulence, both ancient and modern, we consider a passage from Joan Didion's seminal collection of essays, The White Album.

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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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Pyramids are part of global architectural culture. We find pyramid-like structures in Egypt, Mexico, and in many other places. But the word "pyramid" itself comes from Ancient Greek—or perhaps it does. The etymology of "pyramid" is a bit of an unsolved linguistic riddle, and in today's episode we consider some possible origins. We also look to a famous passage from Horace, the poet of Augustan Rome, who hopes that his own literary legacy will outlast such great architectural monuments.

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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 all plan for the future we want, even knowing that the best laid plans of mice and men can go awry. When we try to look ahead and make the best choices, we exercise a kind of "providence," at least according to the etymological roots of this word. In today's episode, we consider the notion of providence and its close relation to "prudence." We also look to John Milton's Paradise Lost, whose final lines draw out some rich moral paradoxes about human freedom.

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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 might think of grubs hidden under a rock when we hear the word "larva" today. The word comes from Latin, but at least originally, it doesn't mean "insect"—rather, it means "ghost." Today we consider the strange development of biological terms while also revisiting a famous ghost story in a comedic and somewhat bizarre novel from the Roman world, Petronius's Satyricon.

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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 word "panoply" today might denote a magnificent or pompous display, but its roots lie in the armor of ancient Greek soldiers. In today's episode, we consider some military terminology from the ancient world, tracing its early influence on the Greek New Testament. After consulting an episode from the Histories of Herodotus, too, we touch on one of the longstanding concerns of ancient political thought: that tyranny might arise not from a corrupt monarchy, but instead through a gullible public.

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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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Latin and Greek have their own words for love and attraction—amor and eros, for instance—but these words don't serve as the root of our word "romance." Instead, "romance" comes from the very name of the Latin-speaking people, the Romans. How does the name for a population come to mean something about affection? We consider Jane Austen's Persuasion to help us track the meaning of "romance" from its ancient origins to our modern era.

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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 most famous nostos—or "homeward journey"—in Greco-Roman literature is the arduous trip Odysseus makes after the Trojan War, as told in Homer's Odyssey. The longing for such a return forms the root of our word "nostalgia," first used in the seventeenth century. Today we look at how this original notion of nostalgia as "homesickness" morphed into our modern use of the word as a longing for the past. We also consider the idea of one's own consciousness as a kind of psychological home, captured in Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.

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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 common Latin verb legere has an astonishing range of meaning: to pick up, to read, to overhear, to track someone's footsteps. When negated, this verb develops into the modern English "neglect" as well as related words like "negligent" and "negligence." In today's episode, we also consider the stylistic principle of "diligent negligence" (or perhaps "careful nonchalance") from the Roman statesman Cicero and its afterlife in Raymond Chandler, the master of hard-boiled crime fiction.

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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 word "island" itself has Germanic, rather than Greco-Roman, roots. But the Latin word insula—which also means "island"—generates several English words, including "insulate" and "insular." After considering some of these English derivatives, we turn to Herman Melville's Moby Dick, a novel that uses the image of an insular landmass to illustrate the very mystery of human existence.

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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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