Visit theallusionist.org/bane to listen to this episode and get more information about the topics therein
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, am still receiving language's post from when it used to live here. Can I stop forwarding it now? It’s been years.
By the way, if you’ve never beheld inwhiches.tumblr.com, do, do behold it: to go with every episode’s inwhich, there’s a lovingly chosen gif, thanks to Ashra who curates them. Do I sometimes worry about the inwhich I’ve written giving Ashra a hell of a chore? I do. (Do I do it anyway? Yes, sorry.)
For today’s instalment of Four Letter Word season, we’re hopping from ‘bane’ to ‘bain’ to ‘bath’, via doll’s eyes, placentas and curses. Listen to other episodes in the season down your podfeed, including the scandal suffix -gate, park, the F-word and the C-word, the D-word - which is dino, it’s not rude at all.
On with the show.
Bane
You’ve heard my husband Martin Austwick’s music on the podcast; occasionally, very occasionally, I also let him speak on the podcast.
HZ: Welcome back to the show, Martin, for your annual-ish visit.
MARTIN AUSTWICK: Oh, thanks. Last time I was talking about Schrodinger?
HZ: No, I think you're talking about apples.
MARTIN AUSTWICK: Apples, yeah. Another thing that I'm an expert on,
HZ: Martin, what do you think of when you hear the word bane, B-A-N-E
MARTIN AUSTWICK: I think of the Batman guy played by Tom Hardy. [Does impression that sounds like a cushion is stuffed into his mouth.]
HZ: In Old English, the word 'bane' meant a murderer or a devil. And another interesting fact to me is that that word has the same root as 'bahn' as in Autobahn.
MARTIN AUSTWICK: Really?
HZ: Yes, but not like ‘auto murderer’ though. It's just the sense of cutting a swathe through something.
MARTIN AUSTWICK: Okay. Yeah. Interesting.
HZ: But I think aside from the vernacular of someone saying "bane of my life", I only really hear of bane these days in plant names.
MARTIN AUSTWICK: Mm-hmm.
HZ: Wolfsbane, fleabane, bugbane, dogbane, leopard’s bane. All these plants are poisonous.
MARTIN AUSTWICK: Are these poisonous to those specific creatures?
HZ: It would be amazing to discover that a plant is poisonous only to leopards.
MARTIN AUSTWICK: “I fed it to my dog fine. Pet leopard, no.”
HZ: "I just need something to keep all these leopards out my flowerbeds, but I want the squirrels to be okay." I think they used to use banes to put poison on arrow tips when they were killing wolves -
MARTIN AUSTWICK: Oh, wolfsbane Right. makes sense, doesn't it? Yeah.
HZ: And dogs, dogsbane. And I suppose if you're trying to kill a flea with an arrow?
MARTIN AUSTWICK: That's a weird one. Is it just like flea bane is like slightly poisonous. So maybe it would kill a flea, but it wouldn't kill a person.
HZ: It just has a kind of insect repellent vapour.
MARTIN AUSTWICK: Or maybe it makes you really itchy when ou get it on your skin.
HZ: Yeah. Well, uh, these plants are very poisonous to humans. They have been used in medicine since ancient times, and I think still are in some cultures. Yave to really know what you're doing, because while they might help with a cold or as an analgesic, they can really kill you.
Now, Martin, uh, you have recently written a song about poisonous plants.
MARTIN AUSTWICK: Yeah, I have. Yeah.
HZ: What was the inspiration for that?
MARTIN AUSTWICK: Well, you were there.
HZ: It was when you poisoned me with a plant, wasn't it? Wifesbane.
MARTIN AUSTWICK: Is that a real one?
HZ: No!
MARTIN AUSTWICK: I bet it is.
HZ: Where did this idea for a song about poisons come from?
MARTIN AUSTWICK: We were visiting a stately home, and it had some historical connections. We went to a talk about medicine, which I guess is sort of medicine that was in the 18th or 17th century when this house was in its prime, so it was a lot of herbalism. There was some stuff about amputation. It's one of those talks that - you know when you go to a talk and they just really focus on the grimmest parts of that age of history? And for history of medicine, that's obviously very, unpleasant. So it's all amputations and people swelling up with pus and popping, and horrible, horrible, horrible stuff.
HZ: Crowd-pleasers!
MARTIN AUSTWICK: And at some point this person started talking about the fact that this stately home - which, again, is open to the public for a small fee, families can visit children, animals, et cetera - this person wanted to have a poison garden. The stately home nixed this idea, to which this docent said, "Well, I wanted to have this poison garden, but I suppose it's not woke." And I thought that was absolutely fascinating that they'd hung onto this particular word. If they’d said, “It's health and safety gone mad,” I would've disagreed, but at least they would've been correct.
HZ: It would have been the right jargon to pick.
MARTIN AUSTWICK: It's like they've got hold of the wrong word. But it's the same concept of like, "The liberals won't let me do the thing that I want to do."
HZ: It is one of the hottest linguistic trends of the past decade: people using the word ‘woke’ who don't understand what woke is supposed to mean. Sometimes deliberately. I think in this person's case, they were just like, “Woke means nope.”
MARTIN AUSTWICK: Yeah. This person was a little older, I doubt they were very online.
HZ: It's not very 17th century herbalist.
MARTIN AUSTWICK: No, it's not, absolutely. Even if you're careful and you are correct that there's not a huge safety risk here, there's a small risk that an animal or a child might get into the poison garden and get it on their skin or eat it, and then that child or animal will get very sick. So it didn't seem particularly woke to me to say “You're not allowed to have a poison garden at a place that's open to the public.” But it was intriguing to me that they got hold of this phrase somehow, and to them it just meant, "I'm not allowed to do the things I used to do when I was younger, because the world has changed in a way that I think is nonsensical."
HZ: I don't know whether there was a peak of poisoned gardens in this person's lifespan.
MARTIN AUSTWICK: Huge in the 1970s.
HZ: Well, let's hear the song that this absence of poison garden inspired.
Song: ‘Poison Garden’ by Martin Austwick AKA Pale Bird
I suppose it isn’t woke now
To have a poison garden,
To be polishing my doll’s eyes
In the calla and the bracken.
I’ll slip into my foxgloves
To tend the silky oak,
To have a poison garden
I suppose it isn’t woke.
I suppose sitting on my porch,
Nursing a cup of tea
with a little splash of brandy,
Chuckling very softly
At the dying children
That I lured into my garden -
I suppose that isn’t woke,
I suppose that isn’t woke.
I suppose hatred isn’t woke,
I suppose that’s out of fashion;
I suppose dictatorships aren’t woke,
I suppose they’d call that ‘fascism’.
The hunger, plague and war and death
Of which the Bible spoke,
I suppose you’re here to tell me
Liking horses isn’t woke.
Soaking in the close of day,
Watching it all slip away,
Sinking like a stone,
In the water of your hope,
A well you somehow fell into.
And I’m so glad that I’m not you,
But I suppose that isn’t woke,
I suppose that isn’t woke.
But you can’t deny biology,
Nightshade and red castor bean,
Oleander, rosary pea,
Winter cherry and strychnine,
Hellebore, wild rosemary,
Bloodroot and black bryony,
Passionflower, herb-paris
Belladonna, mayday tree.
HZ: There's a reference in there to some deep Austwick family lore: doll's eyes.
MARTIN AUSTWICK: This has a double meaning. Do you wanna hear the Austwick meaning first?
HZ: No, I want to save that. Doll's eyes are also… they're a bane!
MARTIN AUSTWICK: They're a poisonous berry: white baneberry. They do look incredibly weird.
HZ: Yeah, they look like those models in school chemistry of atoms joined together.
MARTIN AUSTWICK: Yeah, it looks like a long carbon chain with like the little hydrogen atoms in white, but those little hydrogen atoms are like weird eyeballs, like snakes' eyes.
HZ: They're little white balls joined by red sticks.
MARTIN AUSTWICK: “The berries contain cardiac toxins, which have immediate sedative effects.”
HZ: They can cause cardiac arrest; they can cause hallucinations, respiratory paralysis. Very dangerous, very dangerous. Used in Native American medicine for coughs, colds and itches though.
MARTIN AUSTWICK: Oh really?
HZ: Again, you gotta know what you're doing!
MARTIN AUSTWICK: Don't overdo it with doll's eyes.
HZ: But in the Austwick family, doll's eyes are a part of a saying.
MARTIN AUSTWICK: My great-grandmother, she had this expression. You know when people ask you where you're going, “I'm just going to go out.” “Oh, what are you' doing?” and you don't want to tell them, it's too complicated to explain. The classic way of deflecting inquiries is to say, “I'm gonna see a man about a dog.”
HZ: Mm-hmm. Or a horse, “gonna see a man about a horse.”
MARTIN AUSTWICK: A horse? Is that a real thing? I think I grew up in a slightly less posh part of the country than you.
HZ: No, it's a gambling thing.
MARTIN AUSTWICK: Oh, oh, I see, yeah, that does make sense. Well, so what she would say instead of “I'm gonna see around about a horse/dog,” is she would say, "I'm gonna see Nicky Pluff," and if you said, "Who's Nicky Pluff?" she would say, "Nicky Pluff, the doll's eye polisher." Which is the weirdest way, such a weird way to deflect.
HZ: And while you were standing there with your mouth agape and your head involuntarily shaking, she would make her escape.
MARTIN AUSTWICK: Yeah. I think by the time you parsed what's happening, she'd be out the door.
HZ: Nicky Pluff, the doll's eye polisher.
MARTIN AUSTWICK: Nicky Pluff, the doll's eye polisher.
HZ: If this was in anyone else's family vernacular. I would love to hear about it.
MARTIN AUSTWICK: Yeah, actually, that'd be really interesting. I'm the only, she's the only person I know to have said this, but that doesn't mean she may invented it. There may have been someone else she got it from.
HZ: Well, maybe it is symptomatic of how the business of doll's eye polishing has really dried up in intervening years.
MARTIN AUSTWICK: AI is killing doll's eye polishing.
Bain Marie
From ‘bane’ B A N E to ‘bain’ B A I N, which was sometimes an alternate spelling of ‘bane’, but I want to talk about it in its other job which is being the French word for ‘bath’, and specifically in the term ‘bain marie’, the cooking contraption the bain marie -
INTRUSIVE VOICE: What is it?
HZ: It’s a double boiler.
INTRUSIVE VOICE: What’s that?
HZ: It’s like a pan inside another pan and in between the pans there’s warm water.
INTRUSIVE VOICE: Why?
HZ: It’s for when you’re cooking something that you don’t want to get too hot, like if you’re melting chocolate or making hollandaise sauce -
INTRUSIVE VOICE: What’s that?
HZ: It’s an emulsion of egg yolks and butter, usually with a squeeze of lemon -
INTRUSIVE VOICE: Like a hot mayonnaise?
HZ: Sure.
INTRUSIVE VOICE: Why’s it called Hollandaise then? Is it from Holland?
HZ: No, it’s French.
INTRUSIVE VOICE: So why -
HZ: It was named during the Franco-Dutch war and somehow ended up named after the opposing force.
INTRUSIVE VOICE: Why?
HZ: I too would love to know but that is difficult information to find out - one source even prefaced their incorrect explanation with “According to history”.
INTRUSIVE VOICE: That’s not a meaningful attribution!
HZ: I know right?
INTRUSIVE VOICE: You know bearnaise sauce, yeah?
HZ: Yes?
INTRUSIVE VOICE: Is bearnaise sauce mayonnaise made with bears?
HZ: AS I WAS SAYING, the bain marie, when I thought about the cooking device the bain marie -
INTRUSIVE VOICE: Think about them a lot, do you?
HZ: Not a great deal, no.
INTRUSIVE VOICE: Always dreaming of a bain marie?
HZ: Can’t say I am -
INTRUSIVE VOICE: Got bain maries on the mind?
HZ: Rarely -
INTRUSIVE VOICE: “Ooh, there goes Helen, off to contemplate the bain marie!”
INTRUSIVE VOICE 2: “AGAIN?”
INTRUSIVE VOICE: “I know, it’s her simmering obsession.”
HZ: Come on now, did I hurt you in a past life?
INTRUSIVE VOICE 2: “Uh oh, somebody’s boiling with rage.”
INTRUSIVE VOICE: “Careful now, we’ve got a meltdown.”
HZ: Are you nearly done?
[Intrusive voices snicker]
INTRUSIVE VOICE: Yeah, ok. Done like a hollandaise sauce that has gone pale and creamy…
HZ: Are they gone?
When I thought about the cooking device the bain marie - which, as I said, has rarely if ever happened, I deduced it would translate to English as ‘Mary’s bath’ and glancingly assumed it was another thing named after Mary, mother of Jesus. Because there are lots of things named after Mary, mother of Jesus: as well as many places and people, there are:
ladybirds/ladybugs - our lady’s bugs, there’s a whole episode in the back catalogue about that;
mariposa - Spanish word for butterfly, butterflies looked like Mary’s praying hands;
the plants known as marigolds - Mary’s golds, choose your explanation: to honour her with gold, because they bloomed around the time of the Feast of the Annunciation of Mary on 25 March, because they were used to decorate church altars…
Anyway, so many Mary-mother-of-Jesus-named things, that I thought the bain marie would be another, for no especial reason, not because she simmered Jesus until he was cooked, or because in a Biblical mistranslation she was said to be good at tempering chocolate. But no, I learned the bain marie is named after another ancient Mary: the Egyptian alchemist known as Mary the Prophetess. And also known as Mary the Jewess, and Mariya the Sage, and by several variants of the name Mary and the word ‘prophetess’.
Most of what we know about Mary the alchemist comes from another alchemist from Egypt, Zosimos of Panopolis, who wrote the first known text on alchemy, and in it he writes about and quotes influential alchemists from ancient-to-him times, like Mary, of whom he seemed to be a big fan. Subsequent to Zosimos, people repeated the claims that he had made about Mary, and added more to join her biographical dots: she was sometimes conflated or confused with Miriam, sister of Moses, or with Mary Magdalene, close personal friend of Jesus; or she cradled Jesus as a baby; or she lived 500 years before he was even born. None of this was likely true, but add a substance to the base material and maybe it’ll make gold.
Mary was one of the top 52 alchemists, according to Ibn al-Nadim’s Fihrist, the catalogue of 10,000 books in Arabic and their authors published in the year 987. She may have been making hydrochloric acid centuries earlier than its presumed manufacture; she would make clay, glass and metal ovens sealed with fat and starch; she had the treasured ability of making cardinal purple pigment - a by-product of making sulphuric acid - and she stated that akin to a living being, metal was the body and the vapour was its soul. Zosimos credited her with inventing several pieces of apparatus: the kerotakis, a device used to melt metals and collect their vapour, or as a furnace for sulfur or arsenic; the tribikos, which was a triple-spouted distiller; and the balneium mariae, the bain marie, marienbad in German, but not named after her until the late 1200s or early 1300s, by Arnaldus de Villa Nova, who was doctor to several popes and also probably an alchemist himself.
Did Mary invent the bain that bears her name? No. Most sources put Mary the alchemist as living within the first two centuries of the Common Era, so the bain marie almost certainly preceded her - it appears in the medical writings of Hippocrates around 400 BCE, and in the botanical work of Theophrastus in the fourth century BCE, and in the recipes written by Cato the Elder in his 165 BCE farming manual De agri cultura, the oldest known surviving work of continuous Latin prose: Cato advises cooking an erneum, a mixture of flour, sheep’s cheese and honey, in an earthenware jar plunged into a copper pot of hot water, and when it’s cooked, smash the earthenware jar to eat it. This is a variation on his recipe for placenta, a cake also made of sheep cheese, flour, honey, and sheets of dough - no, no bodily organ placentas are in there, in fact ‘placenta’ as a term in biology comes from this kind of cake, and the word derives from the Greek plakoenta meaning ‘flat’.
Words go on unexpected journeys, don’t they? Placenta became more dramatic and bain marie became less; Mary was thought to have run her bain maries hot, for heating up metals at the temperature of boiling water, whereas now the water in a bain marie is more usually no hotter than a simmer, because you don’t want to scramble your hollandaise sauce. My tip for hollandaise? Don’t bother melting the butter; keep it cold and cut it into small cubes to whisk into the sauce. Mary’s tip for a lower temperature to warm ingredients instead of the bain marie water? Dung. Yeah, never accept eggs benedict from an alchemist.
Bath
From the French word for bath to the English word for bath which is…bath, and time, I thought to refresh our memories of a piece I made, gosh, eight years ago now, yikes, I went to the English city of Bath and the historic baths there, to learn about an ancient way of venting rage. Anyway, let’s travel back in time eight years, and then another couple of thousand years.
2017-era HZ: Somebody has really ticked you off. You're all steamed up inside and you want to vent that rage using words, but you don't want to confront them directly because you're either too polite or too cowardly. So do you:
A. Subtweet them.
B. With your finger, scrawl an insulting message into the dirt on their car.
C. Get a small sheet of lead, scratch into it a message cursing your enemies, roll it up and throw it into your nearest sacred spring?
Oh, I forgot to mention that it's 1700-2000 years ago and you're living in the Ancient Roman Empire, so the answer is C. A lead curse tablet.
STEPHEN CLEWS: If we look in this case to the right, we can see half a dozen curse tablets here. And above the case there's a reference to something called UNESCO memory of the world. Which is one of UNESCO's schemes for recognizing intangible cultural heritage. So it's not a monument. Actually it's all to do with ideas and concepts, things like music and poetry. And the things that go on in our heads. And the curses were added to the UNESCO register in 2014.
HZ: It's good to have a record of human bitterness and anger.
STEPHEN CLEWS: Yes. Indeed.
HZ: Stephen Clews is the manager of the Roman Baths at Bath in southwest England, from which 130 ancient curse tablets have so far been fished out, dating from a 200-300 period from around 2000 to 1700 years ago. Curse tablets, defixiones in Latin, are quite common artefacts - around 2,000 lead curse tablets have been found in sites across the former Roman Empire, 300 in Britain alone. At Bath, there's a lot of sludge at the bottom of the sacred spring that hasn’t been dredged through yet - so the waters could well still contain further curses. Also possibly more curses were written on materials that were not as durable as lead, so have disintegrated into the once sacred hot spring waters that swirl away like a big vat of curse soup.
STEPHEN CLEWS: Well, standing here on a balcony overlooking the spring, we can see it bubbling below us.
HZ: A rather beautiful green colour.
STEPHEN CLEWS: It is, yes. They're actually found about probably I'd say about six metres from the end of my arm, going straight down, because we're looking down on this from really quite a great height.
HZ: The Baths are a warren of pools and structures, built above and below the present day ground level. It’s a many-layered place: there has been human activity at the site of the baths for thousands of years. There’s evidence of Iron Age tribes there. The Celts built a shrine to the goddess Sulis a couple of thousand years ago. Then the Romans invaded, and built a grand temple and a bathing complex. And then on top of those, there have been many modifications and additions since - 12th century and 16th century bathing facilities; 18th century pump room, 19th century museum and concert hall. Layers of construction piling up above the spring, previous incarnations obscured and forgotten; and beneath all of it, under the water, the curse tablets. They lurked in the bottom of the Bath baths for about one and a half thousand years. Then, in the 1880s, one Major Charles Davis was doing some maintenance.
STEPHEN CLEWS: He was the city architect and engineer, and there was a problem with people in nearby houses complaining that water penetrated their basements - hot water. So logically enough, he assumed it came from the spring. And so amongst all the various operations he did, he broke down through the floor of the medieval bath to see what was going on. And he found beneath it the Roman chamber that had been built to encase the spring.
HZ: While trying to patch up the leaks in the chamber, Major Davis trawled through some of the deposits at the bottom of the waters.
STEPHEN CLEWS: In doing this, he recovered two lead curses; and he wasn't sure what to make of them.
HZ: So he sent them off to Germany, where the finest philologists set to translating the two curse tablets. One they managed to crack, partially: it was complaining of a theft of something called ‘vilbia’, a Latin word they didn't know, so it might be a woman's name.
The other, they couldn't understand at all. That curse tablet perplexed translators for a hundred years. Then, in the 1980s, a further 128 tablets were excavated from the baths, and at Oxford University, paleographer Roger Tomlin worked on translating them, including that pesky curse tablet from the first haul.
STEPHEN CLEWS: At which point he realized that people had been trying to read it upside down. Having turned it the right way round, it then read rather like a conventional curse. But that of course is telling you how difficult it is to discern the lettering and so on.
HZ: Yes, to be fair, it’s really difficult to read a curse tablet. First of all, the handwriting’s not winning the tidiness prize at any calligraphy contests. And it’s scratched into dark lead, so you need to shine a strong light across it to see it at all. Many of the curse tablets were rolled up, and after so long being buffeted around in the spring, some are too fragile for archaeologists to unroll to see what’s written on them. And not many of the ones they have unrolled are complete.
HZ: This little curse tablet we're looking at looks like a black cabbage leaf.
STEPHEN CLEWS: Yes it does. It illustrates well the fact that they're fragmentary. There are very few of the curses that are whole and complete. Many of them are quite damaged.
HZ: Some of the tablets are mere fragments, with just a few words or letters, and philologists have had to make educated guesses at the full curses.
STEPHEN CLEWS: So to understand it you have to take all the curses, which all have bits of fragmentary text, and then you realize that some of these phrases repeat and so you can, by playing a kind of complex join the dots, you can get a sense of what many of the curses are about.
HZ: There is a bit of a format for the curses. It addresses the curse victim, name unknown; it outlines the complaint; then suggests a divine punishment for their crime. For example, that upside down tablet that took a century to translate:
STEPHEN CLEWS: The translation is: "Whether boy or girl, whether man or woman, whoever has stolen it is not to be permitted," possibly, then some broken text, "unless any innocence. You are not to grant him nor sleep, unless that a bushel of cloud, a bushel of smoke may come.”
HZ: It's a very eloquent sort of cursing.
STEPHEN CLEWS: It is, yes; it's very sort of poetic in style. And this is clearly the way in which one should address a deity.
HZ: I suppose I hadn't thought of that - I had thought of people writing curses in anger, but not the fact they had to be respectful to a deity whilst doing so.
STEPHEN CLEWS: Yes, I think that was the case.
HZ: And the reason for most of these curses found at Bath? Theft. Most commonly theft of money, blankets, tools, clothes - lots of clothes.
STEPHEN CLEWS: Bathing tunics were particularly popular items for theft. We've got references to three bathing tunics having been stolen. Also a number of other cloaks. Docimedis had his gloves stolen. he asked that the person who had stolen them should - apart from returning the said gloves - should also lose both his mind and his eyes.
HZ: That is, I think, disproportionate.
STEPHEN CLEWS: Well, it is in terms of modern thinking, but of course you have to put your mind into a different mindset. So one lady who had a bronze bowl stolen seeks its restoration, and asks that it be filled with the blood of the person who has stolen it. So that's the way life was.
HZ: A hard life, but one that was at least enlivened by the opportunity to come up with inventive and lurid punishments for your enemies. There was one tablet found in Cyprus in 2008 that was inscribed: “May your penis hurt when you have sex.” Don’t know what crime that was in response to, but it’s a compelling punishment for all sorts of offences. And at the time there wasn’t a police force, so I get why people channeled their desires for justice into these furious pleas to the gods. But why would you throw your curse tablet into a bath?
STEPHEN CLEWS: Well of course this wasn't a bath. It was a spring. And it was - well it still is - a hot spring. So it's an unusual place. And the phenomenon of hot water coming out of the ground was something that in Roman or indeed pre-Roman times was something for which no one had any natural explanation. So if you have something happening for which there is no natural explanation, then the explanation is obvious: it must be the work of the gods. So therefore if this is the work of the gods, it's a place where you might find the gods; and so it might be a place where you could communicate with them far better here than in the middle of a ploughed field or perhaps at home in your backyard. So people came to these special places as pilgrims, to worship the presumed deities of these locations.
2017 HZ: And it was common to many cultures across the ancient world, that notion of water being sacred, and therefore a fast track to contact your deities. People threw lots of different objects into sacred waters - buttons and clothing, weapons, models of body parts that they wanted cured of ailments, or gifts like money or gold hair ornaments or engraved plates, to thank the deities for curing the aforementioned ailments or performing other such favours. The idea still has a hold on people in the present day, judging by how many coins are thrown into water features at shopping malls.
PRESENT-DAY HZ: Thinking about it now, I have further questions about water being used as a messaging service to one’s favoured deity - does the deity receive dirty shower water with the same spirit as coins and gold ornaments, and if so, do they become angry about it? Or are they like, “Just what I wanted, greyish soapy water!”
I envy the idea of cathartically lobbing a curse into the beyond, especially as I no longer use Twitter any more, so where are my rants and ires supposed to go now? Not into the water supply; water has enough to deal with without being polluted by my peeves. What do you recommend instead? Transforming rage into something righteous and productive: now, that’s a form of alchemy I could do with.
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Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
manticore, noun: a mythical beast typically depicted as having the body of a lion, the face of a man, and the sting of a scorpion.
Origin Middle English, from Old French, via Latin from Greek mantikhoras, corrupt reading in Aristotle for martikhoras, from an Old Persian word meaning 'maneater'
Try using ‘manticore’ in an email today.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman, on the unceded ancestral and traditional territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
Our ad partner is Multitude. To sponsor this show, get in touch with them at multitude.productions/ads.
The music is by Martin Austwick including his new song ‘Poison Garden’ which isn’t out anywhere else yet! New album is coming soon. But you can listen to the songs he has released hitherto via palebirdmusic.com and Pale Bird on Bandcamp. You can also hear us both on our very long-running and recently revived podcast Answer Me This at answermethispodcast.com.
Recently Martin and I made a beautiful combo of words and music about typefaces and torrid emotions, it’s called Souvenirs, and in the UK you can listen to it on BBC Sounds, and outside of the UK search Falling Tree Archive, it’s up there. If you would like us to perform it live at your arts festival or shindig, get in touch. And I’ve linked to Souvenirs on the show’s website too, where you can also find links to follow the show on whatever remains of the social internet; information about upcoming events; hear or read every episode, including all the other ones in Four Letter Word Season, and see the full dictionary entries for the randomly selected words, all at the show’s forever home theallusionist.org.
