by Priya Malhotra

What do an intoxicating drink and an ancient beauty ritual have in common? How did a word once linked to Roman roads become synonymous with insignificance? And what strange connection exists between human strength and a tiny, scurrying creature?

Language is a traveler. Words cross borders, crisscross centuries, and sometimes transform so completely that their meaning is completely altered. A term that once conveyed insult might, centuries later, become a compliment. A spice that once evoked luxury may later come to symbolize the ordinary. A simple verb in one language may be borrowed and reshaped into something spectacular in another.

The English language, restless and ever-expanding, is a patchwork of borrowed words, forgotten histories, and surprising transformations. While the English language’s primary roots lie in Old English, Old Norse, Latin, and French, it has also incorporated words from languages such as Arabic, Hindi, Dutch, Italian, and Japanese. Some words have arrived quietly, slipping into common speech without much notice. Others are shaped by conquest, trade, or scientific discovery. But every word has a journey—a story hidden beneath its surface, waiting to be uncovered.

Here are seven words whose unexpected and dramatic voyages through time and place remind us that language is not something static – it’s always moving and always changing.

1. Nice

For a word that now suggests something bland, colorless, and ineffectual, nice has had quite the rip-roaring journey. It started off as an insult. Originating from the Latin word nescius meaning “ignorant” or “unaware,” it entered Old French as nice, as in “careless” or “clumsy.” By the late 13th century, Middle English adopted nice to describe someone as “foolish” or “senseless.”

Over the subsequent centuries, nice experienced a series of dramatic shifts in meaning. In the 14th century, it conveyed the sense of being “wanton” or “lascivious,” a far cry from its modern use. By the 15th century, it had transformed again, then used to describe someone who was “fastidious” or “fussy.” It was only in the late 18th century that nice emerged as the polite and pleasant word we recognize today. Read more »

by Ken MacVey

As a lawyer I know too well that lawyers are infamous for looking for the dark lining in a silver cloud. That outlook goes with the territory of trying to look for legal pitfalls and hidden trap doors. That’s part of the job of what lawyers do—trying to protect their clients from legal liability and unexpected detours and disasters that could have been avoided by careful drafting or strategizing. That doesn’t mean lawyers are pessimists but sometimes it is taken that way.

This takes me to the glass half-empty/half-full trope. I have a different take on that trope. I think with a little reframing it tells a different story, illustrating a problem optimists and pessimists can share, and what to do about this problem. Here is the reframing:

There is a glass of water filled halfway to the middle.

The pessimist looks at the glass and says it is half empty. The pessimist goes on to say this is not enough, it won’t get any better, it might get worse with evaporation, maybe the water is contaminated, and we can’t do anything about it.

The result: nothing gets done. The glass stays filled halfway to the middle.

The optimist looks at the glass and says it is half full. The optimist goes on to say everything is good, we should count our blessings for having this nice crystal-clear water, everything is going to be great especially when we’re thirsty, there is no need to do anything, everything will take care of itself.

The result: nothing gets done. The glass stays filled halfway to the middle.

The activist looks at the glass and says: Fill it up!

The result: the glass gets filled up.

You see the problem that optimists and pessimists can share is that they both may rationalize not doing anything when something could get done. Read more »

Once there was a way, to get back homeward… Photo taken in Bruneck, South Tyrol.

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by Lei Wang

I have often been envious of how characters in stories don’t seem to need to do dishes or laundry or buy groceries, except when it serves their story, like a meet-cute at the farmer’s market or perhaps a juicy conflict between two in-laws over the most efficient way to load the dishwasher. Otherwise, in novels and TV but especially in short stories and movies, the refrigerator fills itself and even eating is an afterthought: food is for pleasure, not necessity.

The boring things of life are given the ax, or no one would watch; imagine a maximalist reality show, each episode 24 hours long, corresponding exactly to a day in the life of someone that you play alongside your own life, minute by minute. Even if it were your favorite celebrity, would you really want to accompany them as they sleep for seven hours? I suppose there are such dedicated viewers out there and also such dedicated livestreams, like Firefox’s red panda web cams. I remember years ago coming across a crowdfunding campaign by a European twenty-something who decided to reduce his carbon footprint by sleeping or otherwise staying in his room all day. He was asking for money in order to do nothing, to contribute as little to the world as possible, and prove it via the most boring livestream. If I remember correctly, he had quite a few patrons—if only for the novelty of the idea.

What are the boring bits of life? Sleep, except for dreams. Chores. The things we have to do, and the things we do again and again and again. Life seems to be a constant battle against entropy, and we are losing. “I don’t identify as transgender… I identify as tired,” said Hannah Gadbsy in the comedy special Nanette. Don’t we all. This was the true punishment of Sisyphus: not the moving of the boulder or even the futility of it, but the day-in, day-outness of it all. We just showered yesterday and our hair is greasy already. The kitchen sink was empty a moment ago, but now there are no forks. The dog needs to be walked, again. Why can’t there be a pet that truly eats one’s garbage?

In The Quotidian Mysteries, a book on the mystical aspects of laundry and other domestic tasks, Kathleen Norris writes of how she found her way back to Catholicism through an Irish-American wedding in which, after the ceremony was over, she watched the priest doing dishes. “In that big, fancy church, after all of the dress-up and the formalities of the wedding mass, homage was being paid to the lowly truth that we human beings must wash the dishes after we eat and drink,” she wrote. “The chalice, which had held the very blood of Christ, was no exception. And I found it enormously comforting to see the priest as a kind of daft housewife, overdressed for the kitchen, in bulky robes, puttering about the altar, washing up after having served so great a meal to so many people.” She couldn’t quite understand the service, but she could understand eating, drinking, and housework.

Sacred is something that is “set apart” from the ordinary; something is sacred because it is not meant to be ordinary. But to treat an ordinary task as extraordinary is also to stand out from the ordinary. Read more »

by Claire Chambers

One day I went to my workplace in York, northern England, where I checked my pigeonhole as usual. An airmail letter lay in the metal box. Its postmarks were from Pakistan, and a man’s name and a Karachi address were scrawled on the back of the envelope. Because of the bimonthly columns I write for Dawn newspaper, I sometimes get email feedback. Occasionally people send me their books for review. But this slim package surprised me – especially when I broke the seal and pulled out four pages of Urdu handwriting.

It had been years, probably over a decade, since I received a personal letter. My teenage sons and twenty-something Urdu teacher, Fareeha, claim they’ve never had one, apart from official dispatches. In this digital dunyā, what a privilege it is to get a letter, and that too a piece of mail which had travelled a long way.

This reaching out across distance and cultures reminded me of Saadat Hasan Manto’s ‘Letters to Uncle Sam’ – sharp, satirical notes dissecting international politics and American power. Balram’s letters to the Chinese Premier in The White Tiger also came to mind, with Aravind Adiga’s character telling Wen Jiabao about Indian corruption and inequality. My situation was different – I was in the UK, not the US or China – and the letter writer’s tone proved to be sincere rather than arch or ironic. Yet the impulse to communicate across borders felt equally urgent. In honour of Manto’s ‘Letters’ and to protect my correspondent’s anonymity, in this blog post I will call him Sami. I surmise, though, that he is much closer to my nephew’s age than my uncle’s.

I gazed at the pages, drawn in by the Urdu script and feeling enchanted that someone had created these words with such dexterity. I exulted even more at the newfound reading skills which allowed me to decode bits and pieces.

I wasn’t linguistically equipped to easily decipher the whole letter. The first few lines were straightforward enough. His postal address was repeated, this time in Nastaliq. However, tellingly for this bibliophile, he did not provide any email or phone details. A standard polite greeting was given, and Sami went on to introduce himself. He explained he was a food science graduate but that his گھر کا ماحول – ghar kā maḥol or home environment – had instilled in him a love of literature. Here he name-checked two authors. The first was a writer whose detective novels I had been harbouring an ambition of reading in the original Urdu: Ibn-e-Safi. The other was new to me but my teacher Fareeha later told me he is brilliant: Ishtiaq Ahmed, who wrote spy novels as well as crime fiction. Sami had devoured all the thrillers by these novelists, both of whom are no longer alive. After these childhood peregrinations, he told me, his reading expedition had continued uninterrupted. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Ed Simon

Impossible to know which one of those perennial evergreen subjects – love or death – poetry considers more, but certainly verse can be particularly charged when it combines those two. Love and death, the only topics worthy of serious contemplation, where anything else worth orienting the mind towards is merely an amalgamation of that pair. Maybe that seems counterintuitive, or worse still as mere sophistry, to claim that love and death are ineffable in the manner of God, for after all there are clear definitions of love and death, and furthermore everyone has an experience of them. But it’s their universality that makes them ineffable, because both are defined by paradox. Death, after all, is the one commonality to all of life, the only thing that absolutely every person will experience, but also that which nobody currently alive can say anything definitive about. A paradox, death. Love, though sadly not as universal as death, would seem to be less paradoxical, and yet genuine love is marked by a desire for personal extinction (not unlike death), a submerging of the self into the being of another. An arithmetic not of addition, but of multiplication. Of one and one equaling one.

In American modernist Edna St. Vincent Millay’s effecting “Dirge Without Music,” a free verse four-quatrain poem written in an alternate rhyme scheme that evokes a ballad first published in 1928, death is read in light of love in a manner that provides a glimpse of comprehension as regards those things which are ineffable. Her poem explores the tensions in love and death, not least of all in the title of the poem which is a paradox. A dirge, by definition, is composed of music, so that to have a dirge without music is nonsensical, like a sculpture without shape or a story without narrative. Yet that’s also precisely what death is, an experience of life – perhaps the sine qua non of life which gives it meaning – but also something that can’t be experienced in life since it marks the termination of existence. That particular aspect of death has long been remarked upon, a favored argument of the Stoics and Epicureans in ancient Greece meant as a comfort regarding the fear of extinction. Such an argument maintains that if eternity follows death than the later isn’t really death, and if death is marked by the obliteration of the self than we never really experience it, since experience requires a self. All well and good in terms of the logic, but not quite adequate to the phenomenological question of what death feels like, for what does it mean to experience something defined by an inability to feel (as if listening to a dirge without music)? Read more »

Sughra Raza. Reflection. Merida, Yucatan, March 14, 2025.

Digital photograph.

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by Tim Sommers

In “Calculating God,” Robert J. Sawyer’s first-contact novel, the aliens who arrive on Earth believe in the existence of God – without being particularly religious. Why?

There are certain physical forces, they explain, that make life in our universe possible only if they are tuned to very specific values. Which they are. We are here, after all. But there’s no physical reason that the values need to be set the way they are. The aliens have concluded that someone, or something, set the values of these parameters at the beginning of the universe to insure that life would come into existence. That something they call God.

Here’s a much earlier, very different version of this argument. If you were hiking through the woods and you picked up a shiny object that turned out to be a small stone, it would probably not occur to you that it might have been made by someone. If it turned out to be a watch, however, you would immediately conclude that it had been intentionally created. So, is the universe more like a stone or a watch?

This argument from design was an especially powerful argument for the existence of God when very little was known about biology. The complexity of living things puts watches to shame. But then Darwin came along and used evolution to explain how such diversity, complexity, and apparent design could come about without a designer.

Just when the argument that the complexity of our world could only be explained by God seemed lost, a new, purely physical reason to think that the universe was designed appeared. The one the aliens embrace.

“A striking phenomenon uncovered by contemporary physics,” Kenneth Boyce and Philip Swenson write in their forthcoming paper “The Fine-Tuning Argument Against the Multiverse,” (Philosophy Quarterly) is that many of the fundamental constants of nature appear to have arbitrary values that happen to fall within extremely narrow life-permitting windows.” Read more »

1/1/26 Typhoon USA Aftermath Premonition

—This is a revised version of a poem I wrote when a newly insane river running
through our town one day came through, almost over-toping bridges, spilling
into streets with wild abandon during Hurricane Irene. 

One year back the river tore through
on its fall to the sea, courts and laws
slid beneath a steal (sic) bridge on Maga swells,
small shops (especially) pirouetted off their base,
rushed downstream to lodge against
the remains of a constitution compromised
by Magarussian jackhammers of mad winds.

Cellars of The People filled with mendacious mud
and whatever the river had dredged, whatever it had
sucked from cesspools of Oligarchs, whatever it had
ripped from the gardens of the free, of their
summer afternoons, of their homes and barns,
earth and offal left along its banks, in basements,
in streets, in the vacant classrooms of children before
books were banned, tongues of free speech
caught in eddies of choreographed confusion.

A cornfield, tall enough the day before when its
cobbed yield might have grinned yellow from humble
plates until a typhoon of raw, privileged intent laid it low,
its proud ranks of green stalks now laid flat from
sea to shining sea by Potomac’s winnowing rake, all now
lay supine as a woman or man, after a sweet or savage life,
lie still before the sweep of a polluted sea.
.
Jim Culleny
modified, 3/14/25

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by Katalin Balog

The mind-body problem in its current form – an inquiry into how the mind fits into the physical universe – was formulated by René Descartes in the 17^th century. In his Meditations, a thin volume of philosophy that had a monumental effect on all later Western philosophy, he famously argued that it is possible to conceive of a mind without extension – a disembodied soul – and a body without thought – a mindless zombie. And since whatever can be clearly and distinctly conceived, can be brought about by God, it is possible for there to be a mind without body and a body without mind. He concludes, based on observations about our concept of mind and body, that they are really distinct. His position is called dualism, which is the view that the world has fundamental ingredients that are not physical. Of course, dualism was not original to Descartes; from Plato to the Doctors of the Church and ordinary folks, most people up until the Enlightenment have advocated it. But his way of arriving at it – examining what he can “clearly and distinctly” conceive – has set the template for all subsequent discussions. Nota bene, he had more empirically based arguments as well; for example, he thought nothing physical could produce something so open ended and creative as human speech. He would have been very surprised by ChatGPT.

According to Descartes, the mind, or soul, is an exalted thing: it is non-spatial, immaterial, immortal, and entirely free in its volition. He also thought – reasonably enough – that it interacts with the body, an extended, spatially located thing. In Descartes’ view, there are sui generis mental causes; purely physical causes cannot explain actions. Descartes held that only the quantity of motion is strictly physically determined, not its directionality. In Leibniz’s telling of the story in The Monadology, Descartes believed that the mind nudges moving particles of matter in the pineal gland, causing them to swerve without losing speed, like the car going around the corner. He had a real, substantive disagreement with his contemporary Hobbes, a materialist who thought that there were only physical causes.

Developments in science have had an enormous impact on this debate. The gist is that advances in the physical and biological sciences ultimately ruled out Descartes’s idea of the mind as a sui generis force – though not necessarily other forms of dualism which we will talk about shortly. Not only is it hard to comprehend Descartes’ idea that a non-material mind can move a material body, but such sui generis non-physical causes are ruled out by what we know about natural processes. Read more »

by Mike Bendzela

In a kindergarten classroom in the mid-1960s, a kid named Mikey steered clear of the boys stacking large toy blocks on top of one another and knocking them down again–so obnoxious—and instead went and sat at the table of girls making beads out of salt dough and stringing them together on a thread. These girls were not averse to tasting the salt dough and smacking their lips in disgust. The teacher had wisely settled on salt dough because she knew it wouldn’t poison the students should they eat it. At least the girls were smart and funny and didn’t continually knock each other to the floor.

Mikey preferred these sober, artsy activities–making necklaces of salt dough beads, pressing hand prints into soft clay disks, tracing the profiles of silhouetted heads projected via lamp light onto sheets of construction paper–over the rough-and-tumble of block stacking, fat-ball tossing, and floor hockey, because–well, he just did. Thus developed the central themes of his boyhood–hates sports; likes art and language; hangs out with the girls.

Throughout grade school, gym class gave him a terrible knot in his stomach and he longed to be elsewhere, a disposition cemented into place by an incident during a game of “battle ball,” in which boys stood at opposite walls and hurled large pneumatic balls at each other for God knows what reason, and a ball smacked him square in the face and knocked his glasses off his head.

The glasses allowed him to read the teacher’s flowing, cursive handwriting on the chalkboard, reading which he was good at, and he forever yearned to be allowed to pick up a long piece of chalk and tap-scratch letters onto the board himself. This desire was at long last granted, and soon he was permitted whole boxes of colored chalks to use, and the teacher allowed him and some girl friends to cover the entire chalkboard with decorative chalk drawings. Read more »

by Alizah Holstein

When a statement was issued last November stipulating that a new U.S. government department known by the acronym DOGE was to be formed, the medievalist in me snapped to attention. To me, “doge” was a word with distinctly medieval meaning. But hardly anywhere was this meaning being explored in the context of DOGE.

For anyone who has been living in a glacial crevasse for the past few months, DOGE stands for Department of Government Efficiency. Two phenomena are purported to have inspired the DOGE acronym. One: the cryptocurrency Dogecoin. And two: the “doge” internet meme featuring photos of a Japanese Shiba Inu overwritten with pidgin English text that played on a misspelling of the word “dog.” Both were much beloved by Elon Musk, who has to all appearances been heading DOGE.

But there’s a third association worth exploring as we consider the implications of this (unofficial) government department. Stated simply, a doge was the chief magistrate of medieval Italian maritime republics. Venice had doges for over a thousand years, from 700 until 1797 when the Napoleonic Wars brought the republic to its end. Genoa, for a shorter time, had them as well, and Pisa, too, counts a single doge in its historical register. What in Italian is doge in Venetian is doxe, and both derive from dux, the Latin word for leader and a cognate of duke.

The possible association of DOGE with a medieval magistrate has not been widely explored, but I do think it matters. Why? Because medievalism feels peculiarly salient right now in culture and politics alike. Last month at London Fashion Week, models strutted in chain mail and armor, while one carried a decorative sword.[1] Castlecore, which offers “a nostalgic ideal of luxury and wealth,” is trending on social, and romantasy sells.[2] Medievalism has never been very far from the American imagination, but in this moment it feels top of mind. Read more »

Reflections in panes of glass (or maybe plastic?) in a garage door in Brixen, South Tyrol.

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by Bill Murray

I.

A hundred years ago two battered and beleaguered old men, one an Italian prisoner, the other taken to wandering Irish bogs, arrived at the same fateful truth: the world around them was collapsing.

Antonio Gramsci, Marxist theorist, imprisoned member of the Italian parliament, wrote from his cell that “the old world is dying, and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

William Butler Yeats, a sort of mystic horrified by violence and uncertainty across his Irish homeland, saw the same future. From a cottage in County Galway he wrote “things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” What was worse, “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

One a political theorist dissecting history’s brutal transitions, the other a poet divining the chaos of human nature, both foresaw the same truth—that societies don’t glide one era to the next. Sufficiently stressed they shatter, and from the wreckage, new orders struggle to emerge. A hundred years on, Gramsci and Yeats’s alarmed realizations read less like prophecy than real time commentary.

Today’s Americans grew up confident that they stood outside history’s cycles of rise and fall. Battered but buoyed by victory in World War II (and recognizing an opportunity), the United States built a powerful international system meant to foster global stability and economic growth while, naturally, serving its own interests. And, in a world laid waste by war, so it did.

For the longest time this system forestalled large-scale conflicts, allowing America and its allies to prosper.

That system has played itself out.

It was easy enough for the mighty and victorious United States to stamp its model on a war-exhausted world. Turns out, maintaining that system indefinitely in a restive world is challenging.

Gramsci speaks outside of time straight to this week that the old is dying. As a new alignment struggles to be born, just as he said: witness the morbid symptoms.

American legend still holds that the US is fundamentally different from and superior to other nations. We call it American Exceptionalism.

Exceptionalism thrived during the fleeting unipolar moment. With the Soviet collapse and the Cold War’s end, the U.S. bestrode the globe—for better and worse. But the hubris and mutations born of that era now blind us to our decline. Read more »