This week - we go back to our roots, unraveling a single word that we all think we know. What do Venetian sailors, biblical floods, and viral memes have in common? They all helped shape the word quarantine. In this episode of Lexiconned, TJ explores how a 14th-century medical mandate turned into a global keyword—and what its forty-day origins reveal about culture, language, and human nature.

Sources:

• Oxford English Dictionary
• The Black Death and the Transformation of the West by David Herlihy
• “Quarantine!: East European Jewish Immigrants and the New York City Epidemics of 1892” by Howard Markel
• CDC historical archives
• WHO publications on quarantine practice and etymology
• Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World by Laura Spinney

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