A Geek History of Time - Episode 256 - Interview with Author Jess Zafaris Part I

Episode Date: March 22, 2024

Okay, so there are two possibilities going on here. One, you're bringing up a term that I have never heard before. The other possibility is that this is a term I've heard before but it involves a language that uses pronunciation That's different from Latin it and so you have no idea how to say it properly an intensely 80s post-apocalyptic Schlock film and schlong film, you know, it's been over 20 years, but spoilers Okay, so so the Resident Catholic thinking about that, we're going for low Earth orbit. There is no rational theory. Blame it on me after.

And you know I will. They mean it is two o'clock in the fucking morning. Or I am. I don't think you can get very much more homosexual panic than that. No, which I don't know if that's better. I mean, you guys are Catholics, you tell me. I'm just kind of excited that like you and producer George will have something to talk about

That basically just means that I can show up and get fed I'm going to go to the bathroom. I'm going to go to the bathroom. I'm going to go to the bathroom. I'm going to go to the bathroom. I'm going to go to the bathroom. I'm going to go to the bathroom. I'm going to go to the bathroom. I'm going to go to the bathroom. I'm going to go to the bathroom. I'm going to go to the bathroom.

I'm going to go to the bathroom. I'm going to go to the bathroom. I'm going to go to the bathroom. I'm going to go to the bathroom. This is a Geek History of Time. Where we connect nerdery to the real world. My name is Ed Blaylock. I'm a world history and English teacher here in Northern California. And in the course of playing in the Pathfinder campaign, I'm in friend of the show and brother of mine from another mother, Sean, he and I had an epiphany. He's

playing a dwarf. I'm playing a human paladin. And I decided to take the linguistics skill. And I decided dwarvish was going to be the language that my character was going to learn and I wanted to kind of play around with like you know shouting stuff at each other in some kind of language you know during the game and my first idea was belter and he responded with I'm not gonna be able to do belter we got to find something else and we went through a couple of different options and he suggested Mondo ah and I thought about it for a second and I went actually that's perfect because the Mandalorians are Star Wars dwarves Like think about it intensely honor based culture

Crafters when they're not warriors, they hold grudges for fucking forever. Right? So yeah, and have an underground. Yeah, have an underground. Yeah, in the Mandalorian they actually live subterraneanly. So yeah. Big on heavy armor. Okay. I'm starting to see this. My only question for you is number one, when will this be an episode? And number two... That was actually part of the conversation. I was like, well shit, now I'm gonna have to do an episode about this, aren't I? This is a compulsion. It's a good thing we don't make money off of this.

Is it? Really? It means that we can keep what little integrity we have. That's true. And question number two, how are you going to address the fact that they are on a permanent diaspora? That's a good question. That I don't know. I haven't thought about that one. I look forward to it.

I have some offer suggestions with that. That's an aspect I had not considered previously, but now I'm going to have to and god damn it That's going to be a lot more research. I have to do Awesome, yeah, you say awesome. So anyway, that's me. Who the heck are you man? Yeah, I just jumped right in on your your intro there I'm Damian Harmony I am a high school US history teacher up here in Northern, California and I US history teacher up here in Northern California. And I recently just asked my children if they wanted to run a one shot of D&D of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. So they will be adolescent

monk turtles. And they are all in on it. So I spent about an hour before tonight's recording planning out everything and I found a stat block for Krang and I'm also going to add in the NPC because they're going to be tortles which means they're skirmishers right? I added on the NPC of JC Cones so he's going to be using a lot of great clubs. Yeah fighter with a lot of bludgeoning weapons. Yes exactly that. that there you go I I like it. Yeah, so so Krang

I have to ask war forged He's going to be what was it he was gonna be like a deep gnome Artificer okay, and he will have made the thing that he will be sitting in So it's like like I can get yeah but I've got I've got the like the the I think I've shown you pictures of where they went through the castle to attack the The Cyclops that was obviously me ripping off Conan the Destroyer. Oh, yeah. I showed you those I have one of sewers so That's what we're gonna do. Oh, there you go. Yeah, so awesome. Anyway, that's what we're going to do. Well, there you go. Yeah. Awesome. I like it.

Anyway, that's fun. I did notice that we have another square in the Zoom call with us tonight. I was actually remarking that it's kind of funny that when we have guests that I have met through social media and things like that, that very often the fact that they're in a similar size square just kind of makes my thumb want to want to get ready to scroll and look for things. Yeah. And yeah, tonight we actually have a guest author, the author of Words from Hell, Miss Jess Zafaris. Hi, how you doing? Doing great. How about you? I'm good. Yeah, that's correct. I write books about etymology.

That's etymology words, not entomology bugs. The first one, Once Upon a Word, was for children. And then the second one, Words from Hell, just came out a couple weeks ago and it couldn't possibly be any more inappropriate for children than it is in its current state. I also yammer about word origins on TikTok where people listen to me go on and on about them in an overly detailed way. And then I also work in journalism and advertising

and I've been an editor and content director for publications like Writers Digest and Adweek. Wow. Thanks for having me on the show. That's a much longer CV than I've got. Yeah. You're making the place look all professional and stuff. Yeah, someone should. I have a follow up question for you, Ed.

Yeah. OK, so if the Mandalorians are dwarves, like the Star Wars equivalent of dwarves, there's only one logical conclusion here that I can draw and it is that Gungans are the wood elves of the Star Wars universe. I was thinking what else? Because they live in basically like the lake equivalent of Mirkwood. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Aquatic spiders and stuff. Oh my god, I was gonna be so mad. A whole lot. A whole lot of older fans. All elves now talk with a Gungan accent in my ears. All elves now talk with a gungan accent in my game. And you know what?

I can't find a single flaw in that theory. That's brilliant. Legolas, is Jar Jar Binks? Is he not? I was going to say Jar Jar is a drunken master. He's got that tipsy sway. He has. Yeah.

He is in fact Jackie Chan in the Star Wars universe. But yeah, I can find no flaw with that. And and and that's brilliant. And simultaneously wants me to claw out a part of my frontal lobe. Oh my God, I can't get the idea. But yeah, no, yeah, yeah. Can't argue with it. I can't even really hate it. Although I want to. Yeah, I was saying I want to. I love it because like you can you can bring in, as you know, my daughter cooks from the D&D cookbook. And so you some people want to quality stew, like just immediately.

I need you to give some kind of visual cue before you're going to make a joke like that, because I nearly spat beer all over my computer. I thought you drinking was my visual cue to make good jokes. We need to work on that. That's been 260 episodes, I'm sure we'll get it. Eventually. Yeah. Okay.

Jess, I loved your book and I automatically felt shamed with your introduction because you said that it was not appropriate for children. My daughter grabbed the book and started reading it immediately. She's 11. We've been discussing it in front of my son. I had to stop myself from saying so naturally it's Damien's daughter's favorite book in the whole world. Right. Yeah. Well, she and I are obviously already going already friends and then just going to be better friends as a result.

So, yeah, yeah. I have a pretty clear policy in my house of like, you know better. And therefore there are no like bad. There's no bad knowledge to look up unless I tell you like you're not ready for it. That's one thing. But words are never that thing. So you just need to know when you're using them and how to use them. And if you use them at school, that means you were testing the bounds

and I'm not going to protect you from the consequences. But if you use the house, you know, I'm fine. Alternatively, that means that she can use plenty of the words in the book at school, knowing that they have naughty origins without other people knowing that, because she's now equipped with that knowledge. Agents of chaos. I love it. Yeah, she's a more highbrow version of me as a sophomore. We famously would refer to each other as a Fokker

because we were trying to find ways to swear without swearing. And therefore, we couldn't get in trouble because I was a fast talker. Fokker because we were trying to find ways to swear without swearing and therefore we couldn't get in trouble because I was a fast talker. And so we'd be like, hey, what's up Fokker? And our geology teacher was like, what did you say? I was like, oh, he calls me Sopwith. We call him Camel and I call him Fokker because we're all big fans of World War I fighter planes.

Beautiful. And it's like, god damn it. So and then, you know, something would happen. We'd be like, oh, flock of sheep. He's like, god damn it. So and then, you know, something would happen. We'd be like, oh, flock of sheep. He's like, what was that? I'm like, oh, we prefer to invoke Auwine gods. And so that's what we're. So the better way of mincing oaths.

Exactly. Auwine. I especially love the fact that you knew Auwine. Yeah. At that age of development. I think there's a reason I became a Latin teacher at some point. So yeah. I think.

Yeah. Yeah. So Jess loved your book, enjoying every bit of it. While the students were doing their work this week, I was just laughing and having a good old time. I love that you go from obscenity to scat to insults to... And I really like your treatment of racism, classism, sexism, and ableism all as one thing. And then you even took us into supernatural stuff.

And I love that the thread through it, the golden thread through all of it, is all of these words are kind of taboo even within their context. What gave you the idea for the categories? Or I guess in chapter one, scat-a-gories. That's a good idea. Or a good question. I would say, so when I was writing the children's book, I found that there were a lot of words I couldn't include just because they were too much too naughty. Like I wanted to include the word fascinating, but I didn't realize that there was a phallus in it. And I, you know, I wanted to include words that I found were surprisingly violent, like decimate and things along those lines. So I pulled out all of those and started

collecting them. And then I also found that on my TikTok channel, most people wanted to know about the hidden secrets and the naughtiness and the nefariousness. So I leaned into that. And a lot of what I ended up putting in the book was, A, things that I found curious and interesting, and B, things that my audience did. So I blended the two of them. And ultimately, the chapters are a combination of that and what I thought sounded cool and dark and weird and nasty and violent and thrilling at the same time.

So reasons that I go to like theme parks and haunted houses. Same deal. I kind of want a haunted house or theme park now based on vocabulary. Ooh, I could be into that. Yeah. That'd be something you'd find in Connecticut, I would imagine. Yes, I could see that. Yeah. Okay. So, when you... Here's a question for you regarding that. When you found a word that you're like, oh, that can't work for kids,

aren't there parts of like stages of words where you could be like, well, one etymology starts in this but it does go further back. Like I think the word fascinate, right? It has to do with the phallus but also has to do with marriage torches, the phoskis, right? That are used in the Thalassian rites of the Romans. Why not just stop there for the kids book? Or is there just kind of a integrity

to the words? And if I'm going to go in, I'm going to go all in. I do think you should be true to its original sense. I do. I may have ended up including that I haven't read the kids book in a minute that I wrote. Apparently I should know that. But I have another book between now and then and I'm writing a third one too. So, you know, it's possible that we ended up doing a sanitized variation of that. But I think we just, we ended up selecting words that were a little more whimsical in a more accessible for five to 10 year olds way. Gotcha. What got you, what, okay, so you said that this book was made partly based on, you almost kind of have like immediate market research through TikTok, where the people have spoken. That's great. Yeah. What got you going on TikTok to begin with? Like, when did you start there? Well, I think I started during the early stages

of the pandemic. I was at Adweek, and I had just started it as their audience engagement director. I was challenged with, like, I joined, and I was relatively social savvy, and they were like, you know, we should try TikTok. And I was like, I'm probably too old for that, right? At the time.

And so I launched their channel and mine simultaneously and started experimenting with it. I had been writing a blog called useless etymology for like 10 years before that. So I had been I had ceded a lot of information that was easily translatable to TikTok scripts. And I found that it was very successful. And I was able to use the two channels against one another to figure out what was working and what audiences responded to and how the format differed from like YouTube

and from other video based or blog based platforms. Gotcha. And so you did you get ideas like people requesting words? I constantly do. If I if I have if I post a video, I usually get three or four requests in the comments. It's whether I have the mental energy to make another video after that or if I just want to respond in text. Sure, sure. In my most recent one, I made a video about the origin of the word radical, which is related to the word root and closely related to radish.

So I played off of like radical as being like a radish. And someone in the comments, my opening question was, what's a word you've been thinking about a lot? And somebody said, cosmonaut. So I made a follow-up video about the etymology of cosmonaut. Right, saw those, saw both of those.

Just showed my daughter the defenestrate one actually. Oh, that one's fun. I like to, I like to demonstrate. It's so surprising. You're like three, three defenestrate one actually. Oh, that one's fun. I like to, I like to demonstrate. It's so surprising. You're like three, three, three demonstrations or one. She laughed at the 1.5. One and a half.

Just landing on dung will save you, but landing on protesters will not. We'll decidedly not. So, okay. So and by the way, I liked the connection to the word radish just because, so I used to be a Latin teacher. So I still have all the knowledge up there. It's not seeped away yet.

One of- So you already knew that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Half your stuff is just like me going, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh, which is fun. Yeah, it makes me feel smart that somebody who like is on a social media platform is saying the things that I'm like, yeah, yeah, cool. Yeah. But there is a poem by Catullus. Are you aware of the Radish poem?

No, I don't know that I knew the Radish poem. Oh dear, yeah. Tell me about the Radish poem. He is, I don't think it's as dirtiest to be honest, but everyone else says it is, which kind of tells me what their lack of kink or their presence of kink might be. He essentially threatens to shove a radish up someone's ass who has been sleeping with his girl, while his girl is a woman who has decided to go take work in in a brothel. And so he uses the, oh god, I can't remember the term because I never taught this poem. This is like one of the ones where I was like, okay, I can't justify teaching this to kids. I can justify a lot of Catullus. You want to. Like at university level level you'd be like, okay look Oh, we're doing the radish poem. Yeah

poem yeah But the the radish poem he basically threatens to shove one up someone's butt as revenge Which I always took because I don't like the taste of radishes They're just a little sharp and I was like, oh is he going for that? Like the sharpness of it or or is it just the shape? Because it is buttpluggy. It's flared at the end. So it was interesting that radical came from that

because I would find that a fairly radical act. Yeah, radish buttplugs for sure. Right? That reminds me, I think, and I think you might be correct that it's because they're a little bit spicy because I know that people like it, people who are attempting to con people who wanted to purchase their horse, for example, would make the horse seem younger by inserting like garlic or occasionally eels up the horse's rear and make it sprite leaf for a moment. Boy, that'd work.

Yeah. Good God almighty. Somebody would be dancing. It's fucking animal abuse. My God, I don't know who gets the shorter end of that particular stick. Definitely the horse. Oh yeah, good point. That's a good point.

Well, the eel is good point. Well, the eel is good at squishing in and out of things. So like, you know, they can get out. Yeah, hopefully. Like, but do they know to back? I don't. We may have thought about this too hard already. I think I'm voting for we have. We have a brand to protect. So that's OK. That's rich. OK. The term is Rappadendosis. Rappadendosis. And it's literally the act of inserting a root or a radish

in one's butt, in the anus. Fascinating. Yeah. I love that we have this word. We are blessed. You know that the Romans got up to some stuff. Yeah, you know, it's there's a specific word for that. Like I used to have kids make memes for Latin and we've got all kinds of cool stuff that way, because memes are a really cool way of communicating short concepts.

Right. And one of them was, you know the ones where you've got the marketing guy, he's asking questions and three people answer, and then one person gets thrown out a window, defenestration. There is no word in Latin for yes and no. They do not have words for yes and no. They have a word that means that is the least, that is the most. If you ask, am I walking? The answer would be very similar

to like an Irishman would say, I am walking. You would never say yes. And so you have certain words that mean yay verily, that is the most true and stuff, which I love because you've got a culture that was developed in a swamp. So things are rising and falling. The politics are always shifting. You're divorcing your daughter from this guy so you can marry her off to this guy. So, you know, so no, you don't ever want to be on the hook for saying yes or no. You might say that is the least. You might say that is the most. And it is fun. But they have a word for shoving a radish up your ass. Like, that is definite. Yes and no, we don't want to be on the hook for.

Right. That makes sense. Yes and no, we don't want to be on the hook for. Right, that makes sense. Totally logical. So speaking of which, you had a word that you addressed, pudenda, which would be the plural of pudendum, which is, as you said, it references shame in a lot of ways, which is interesting because when we studied Latin or when I taught it, the word would come up quite often not in the shaming way but kind of almost in

the have you no sense of propriety, have you no shame sir, what is proper, what is modest and so the word shame was a secondary or tertiary version of that but it was almost never used as in you ought to be ashamed of yourself. It was have a little cooth there. And so it was just kind of interesting that the translation from the Latin to the English can carry forward different senses because you can't get your Latin into English if you don't go through the Middle Ages. There's a whole lot more shaming going on in the culture

at that time. Absolutely. Even in Old English, there was a variation, like the Old English word for like what we would call pudenda today or pudendam was called like shame limb, essentially. So it was... it was both shame limb is the word. Hey, I just, I like that shame carries across cultures. Yeah. Yeah. That's wild. And the, and the, uh, uh, particular kind of construction that old English has for that kind of stuff is really as, as an English teacher, the old English stuff

is always a lot of fun for me just because it's so very straightforward. It's like German. Yeah, I was going to say. It has a very like, no, I'm going to take this word and stick this word on it and there might be a contraction somewhere in the middle, but there you go. Right. And that was just the way the language worked. It's a sick house. I don't know what to tell you. This is the house you go to be sick. One of my favorite examples of that is the word bridal. It's cited in the book at one point, but

it looks like it is the word bride with the Latin derived ending al on it. But it is actually a compound of bride and ale because in old English you can tack ale onto a word to make it mean like a party for that thing. So a side, the ale was a party for harvesters at the end of the season. A bride ale was a party for brides and their grooms. So fascinating. Wow. Okay. Yeah. Ed is the one so it's funny of the two of us Ed swears the most But I'm the more vulgar of the two And he drinks and I don't and everybody's like are you serious? Like yeah this you get me sober this way because imagine what would happen otherwise

All about the ale like whereas yeah So Ed is all about the ale. Like, whereas, yeah, half our episodes, I tell him, go get some beer because this is going to be really depressing. Go get another beer because this is depressing. Yeah. I did have one before this too, so we're on the same page. Good, good. Excellent.

So is there a future for you doing sayings? Ooh, that's a good one. I have considered that. My book, interestingly, is number one in the idiom book category or was a couple days ago. It probably isn't anymore on Amazon, which is nice. That's fun. I can definitely do idioms. I tend to fold them into a lot of things. My next book is Useless Etymology. It's based on my blog and there's a lot of writing on that blog about not just words, but idioms as well. So I think that I will probably fold's a lot of writing on that blog about not just words but idioms as well.

So I think that I will probably fold in a lot of that. But having a spinoff book that's exactly about those would also work. Yeah, because there's one that I've always loved and it's the phrase, Akun's age. I haven't seen you in Akun's age. And a lot of people like they bristle at that. Right, because they think it's racist. Exactly. And I actually I bring that up a little bit later in some of my notes that I've got here.

But what I love is that it's not actually racist. It's just stupid. Just ignorant. It is because the English settlers thought that raccoons were immortal. What? I've heard this, but I don't remember the details. Because like raccoons, like you see them at night, they all basically have the same, you know, I was going to say tapestry. That's not the right word. Markings.

But they all have the same spotting. They all have the same striping. But they all have the same spotting, they all have the same striping. And one looks as much like the other that you can figure out if you've never lived where there's raccoons before. And a lot of the English settlers had never seen raccoons because raccoons are not endemic to England. They're endemic to this continent. They're a new world species. Right. And so, which is why in the end game movie, the Marvel end game movie, they always say, when they're chasing after a rocket raccoon, they say, get the rabbit, because the closest thing

that Norwegians would have known to a raccoon would have probably been a rabbit. That's why they call him rabbit. That's why Thor calls him rabbit the whole time. But a Coon's age comes because they thought that Coon's raccoons were immortal. That's amazing. I wonder if that's why. So the raccoon was briefly the symbol of the American wig party.

And I wonder if that was meant to carry that meaning in that context as well. It was also because William Henry Harrison was like often often idealized as a frontiersman. So I wonder if maybe that's it. Hard cider log cabin campaign. The raccoon skin hap at that time too. Little a column A, little a column B, I think probably. When you wake up with your hangover. I also love the origin of the word raccoon.

In most other languages, raccoon literally translates to water bear, or wash bear, because they wash their food in water. But in English, it's an Algonquian or Pahawatan word, meaning he scratches with the hands, which I think is lovely. They must have actually sat back and seen them grooming each other or something. Yeah, they must have, or like they've seen them holding things because they use their little paws like hands. Right. Yeah. I actually was visiting my partner just recently and she lives in a more downtown area than

I and sometimes we'll sit out on her porch and just watch raccoons across the street do their thing. I pulled up, there were like six of them, and one of them was standing guard. It absolutely looked like they were organizing. I believe it. Oh man, they plot. Yeah, they're like, yeah. I've seen the great outdoors, sir,

and you look like you're plotting something, you know? So, I wanted, if it's okay, I wanted to talk to you about Jizz. Okay, yeah, that sounds good. Yeah, things that I have always wanted to say on my podcast. Ed has always said, edit that out. We're not getting into that conversation, no. Right.

Right now, okay, fine. In fairness, that's part of the lost episode about the movie, The Alamo, but no. So in Star Wars, in the 1990s you had a bunch of books written. The EU. At the original EU. I don't know how familiar you are with Star Wars EU. Loosely. I've read a few. Okay. So it started with the Thrawn trilogy and then other people started cashing in on the idea and they set up several Parameters and that was that you you George Lucas himself said here are the rules you cannot marry Luke off

You cannot do anything You you can't reveal Yoda species happy ending no Well, and once Lucas decided he wasn't gonna do the second trilogy, he was like, okay, do what you want with Luke, and he was immediately married to Mara Jade. Yeah. But, you cannot marry off Luke.

You cannot, you can't go too far back, no, you can go far enough back because then it won't be connected. You can't give away Yoda's species. You can't kill any of the main characters without Lucas's specific say so. And there were a few other things. And the other thing was that the continuity all had to match up. So if you wanted to write about something that was seven years after the Battle of Endor,

but somebody else already wrote something that was six years after the Battle of Endor, it has to fit with that. You cannot be like, no, never mind, you know, and then we're going to go with this new thing. Which was cool. And that also included anthology series So they came up with the tales from most icely cantina and the tales from java's palace And in the tales from most icely cantina Figren dan had his own vignette one of the biff the do do do do do do do right? Um, don't do anymore because then we'd lose our bm do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do

do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do

do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do I'm reading this stuff right around this, but before we had the internet in any major way, I'm assuming that you're younger than us, mostly because all of our guests are younger than Ed. But. Ouch. Dude.

Yeah. Always with the old jokes. Yes, but they're classics. But so this is before we had internet pornography as massively as we do now. And this is before the... You had to work for it. You did. You have to go out into the woods and hope that whatever guy stashed his porn out there is not going to come after you. But also, the word come had not been changed to C-U-M as universally.

So jizz and cum as words were not universally known as semen. When did jizz become, this is what it's known for? Was that with broadband internet? Or? Oh, that's a good question. That would be my guess is that j jism, which was typically the word before that, but appeared as early as like the late 19th century.

I'm assuming like things adopted more Z's and spellings changed as people sought to clarify and like early Internet text based chat. Sure. So that would make sense. And I like that he calls it like like jazz, too, because it definitely the word the word jazz also has some like it insinuates that it might also have something to do with that. It's not outright like I am absolutely coming into my instrument,

but it's not not doing that. Right. Right. Actually, what I'm not not saying I am when we did when we did our Henry Ford and the Nazis episode. One of the reasons Henry Ford gave us square dancing in all of our school curricula was because he was protecting against the Jewish conspiracy of jazz music. Ah, and so I dug it naturally, which was to get black kids and white kids to dance and then have sex. So square dancing was the great white hope. And that's why we all had to do it.

Because you can't watch anybody square dance and get at all hot about that. There's nothing at all sexy about square dancing. Like the Kellogg's movement and everything. Yeah, it is to dancing what cornflakes is to breakfast cereal. Yeah, or graham crackers are to anything. Yeah. So, but one of the fellows who I found in a magazine, he was talking about the origins of jazz.

So I kind of deep dove into that a bit. And he said originally it was called, I think it was Jazz, J-A-S-S. And then he said it was Jazzm. And I could go back and find it in my notes, but I'm pretty sure. And folks, y'all can go back and listen to the Henry Ford Nazis episode. It's fun But speaking of Ed drinking, yeah But he he even said the the guy who was being interviewed was like a musician from the 1800s in the 1900s And he even said oh, yeah, we call the jazz. We knew what we were saying He admitted it and he was like, yeah, this is, yeah. I don't remember exactly when it went when or where it was that I saw it, but it was there was an article, probably in a Playboy magazine, at some point, that talked about early stag films. And one of the things that got mentioned was the word jazz being used

as a term for intercourse that like a placard came up on because it was a silent film and a placard came up on the screen. It was a guy saying to to the female lead in the movie, I'll give you a good jazz. Oh, wow. And I mean, it does make a good euphemism for that so I get it Right, right it also adds like a touch of naughtiness to like the otherwise relatively sanitary a team show cuz Hannibal is always on the jazz In the realm of our fandom here. No, no it is. I'm'm surprised we haven't done an A-Team specific episode yet. I covered it when we talked about it. I watched every episode of that show like four times each. I love it.

We did a few episodes on Roddy Piper and They Live. And so I talked about the A-Team quite extensively there, like you do. Nice. But yeah, and Hannibal, honestly, he was obviously there to make sure that they all did the ookie-kookie because he said

I love when a plan comes together. Oh, of course. But okay, so I just found the reference that I was talking about. It was a guy named Ubi Brooks and Ubi Banks and he said when Broadway picked it up they called it jazz. It wasn't called that. It was spelled J-A-S-S. That was dirty and if you knew what it was you wouldn't say it in front of ladies. Interesting. That was dirty. And if you knew what it was, you wouldn't say it in front of ladies. Interesting. That's cool. And that also explains why there was such a public outcry, conspiracy based or otherwise, about the style of music and the way people danced to it. Yeah. And I also found a reference in the 1860s that jasm meant pep, like energy.

And that fits with all of the catalogs that were sent to moms to get their boys devices to keep them from nocturnal emissions. Because they thought the body was a closed system of energy. And if you spilled too much seed recreationally, you would soften your own brain. You would lose energy as a result. Amazing that, folks, got brought up in our episodes about idiocracy and eugenics.

Wanking on the term eugenics. Yeah. Yep. Fun times. That's the rough thing I found writing this book in particular is a lot of these terms are a lot of the terms that I end up exploring like if they're not as naughty but a little more scientific they almost always go back to like people who are attempting to be like sexually progressive or medically progressive

but they were also eugenicists yeah like have a lot of us right exactly god damn it and he's Alice We found Helen Keller advocating for death panels in an open Really like of all the people like Yeah, good stuff good stuff, um, okay. So here's another one that I found I'm kind of just picking words that I really enjoy and just stuff that I was like That's how you're supposed to read the book. Like you're supposed to just be like, ah a word. That's horrible. Throw it away Have you ever have you ever seen throw mama from the train? I don't think so We might have found the generational divide. Okay. Tell me about this. You have missed out. Oh, yeah. Okay All right, so it's Billy Crystal and Danny DeVito and you've got me. It's sold done easy

so and actually Captain Janeway from Voyager. Oh cool. Yeah, Kate. I Can't I'm blanking on it. Yeah, I'm not gonna be able to call that either. All right. Well, that's on me. But she's in it as is the the mom from the Goonies, the one with. Oh, yes. The missing tongue piece. So that's mama. And it's essentially strangers on a train updated

with and made into a comedy. Yeah, a dark, dark comedy. Dark, dark comedy. But... Oh, goodness, I don't know why I brought that up now. Well, I have homework, if it comes back to you. Yeah, it'll come back to me. It was something that you had said. Oh, yeah, yeah, that's what it is.

So, Billy Crystal teaches, and see, I don't edit this stuff out so people know how authentic we are, and this is why we don't have sponsors. But Billy Crystal teaches a writing class, and the people in his writing class are just up and down the spectrum of wonderful to terrible to pathetic to really weird, because it's community college, and back then they actually served their communities. But he's teaching a writing class and one person, their assignment was to write a book or write a story. And a guy, he basically, it was 101 women I would like to, and they edited it because this is back before

they guaranteed you that, okay, you can say fuck one time if it's PG-13, but any more than that, then it gets up to an R. So you can hear that they edited the word pork instead of fuck, which I always get a kick out of because that's so much worse. That's so much worse. That's so much worse. That's like the word, that song WAP, like the sanitized version is so much better because instead of saying wet ass pussy They say wet and gushy, which is so much Right and yet and yet like throwing the word moist at the wall

Dozen times like oh stop saying that just oh God. And yet I think it is a level up from just wet. It's wet and gushy. Sir, you are doing quite well if it is wet and gushy like this. Yeah, I mean, you know, yeah, but word choice is important. Right. Says the English teacher.

Please. But the one of the fellows, he's this older man and he is clearly a pervert and it's 101 woman I'd like to fuck except that Billy Crystal says pork instead, which is just worse. And his comment is it's a coffee table book. It's a coffee table. You mimicked him very well there. That was good. Yeah. It's a maladaptation that I have. But I thought about your book as it's a coffee table book.

Basically. Speaking of which, do you know why pork became euphemistic for and not a good euphemism for sex? You know what? That's not in the book. Obviously I missed out on that one. I'm not sure. I can absolutely look into this and like bring it up on a future episode. I would love that. Just kind of spitballing on it. I wonder if it has something to do with the the euphemism pork sword for the male tackle. Right. Yeah. Like, my brain thinks, having read a lot about this particular topic, it makes me think that that pork as the verb there is older.

I could be wrong, but like for some reason that sounds more correct. So. Right. Well, and often you get the verb before you get the adjective, because the adjective comes from a participle form of the verb quite often. So, all right, so, yeah, one of the words I found was glans. In Latin it's glans, which clearly is not a Latin word because it starts with a G, so it's going to be from the Greek. But the Roman version of this, the Latin version of this, is glans, which means it can mean testicle, beech nut, or sling bullet because it's shape-based, right? Mm-hmm. What I love though is that the actual, so I assume you know that you know enough

about Latin. Do you have any other languages in your head, by the way? I have segments of Arabic and segments of French and segments of German and segments of Latin. So because you lived in Algeria and Cameroon, what happened? I did spend about six months in Morocco. But I am also like, please don't test my knowledge of this because I will embarrass everyone who's ever spoken Arabic. I'm not I'm not name three songs kind of guy. Oh, you're like name three verbs But uh, but in in Latin the nouns as you know, then are are categorized by gender masculine feminine and neuter And the word glans is a feminine noun

Despite it meaning all kinds of masculine Itemized things. Yeah. It's a nut, it's a nut, it's a bullet. It's the things that you shoot at your opponents. And typically they would carve, if it was a lead bullet, if it was a lead glance, they would carve words into it, because it's a very soft metal.

Words like, take that, or here some people that you know it's kind of like how we would put chalk on bombs right. This is for Pompey's wife. In your face was pretty common. Oh my god incredible. Oh it's great especially when you realize there and they know that they're throwing glans which is another word for testicle at their opponent's faces like it's it's all wrapped up in there and I just I love that. But I love that. I love how horny Latin is. Like you don't get that in grade school Latin. Yeah. No, not so much.

Student interest would probably be higher if they were honest about that. It's the same thing about. Yeah, it's the same thing about teaching Shakespeare. OK. If you're teaching this to ninth graders, you need to include the fact that they're teaching Shakespeare in the same way that teaching Shakespeare. Okay, if you're teaching this to ninth graders, you need to include the fact that like, no, no, this sounds like a dirty pun because it is one. Because it is one. Right. And by the way, here's another

one that we don't know anymore because the language has evolved beyond it. But when he says this, he's talking about this. Right. It's so dirty, we've forgotten what this meant. We've forgotten, yeah. Yes. But I do love that a word that has such masculine undertones comes back to being a feminine noun. Yeah, that is so interesting.

Yeah. Can you clarify the difference between pan and omni when it comes? Because I read your section on sexuality. Pansexual versus omnisexual. I had trouble parsing that. It's actually, while you're at it, if you could define neurosis for me, because I've never had it properly defined. And it's not because people haven't done a good job.

It's because my brain doesn't wrap around certain concepts well. And I think pan and omni, there's a distinction there that I cannot loop into. I was hoping you could clarify that for me. Oh, that's a good question. I think so. Pan would be like both are both are like all or every or whole. But pan gives me at least well, pan has some Greek connections that like, I don't know, at least as far as I am speaking kind of anecdotally or or perhaps making an assumption which perhaps Omni implies, I think more of a, I'm making sort of a globe shape with my hands.

But I think it's more that one is from, that pan is from Greek and so you get both. And the classics folded into English and complicated and not entirely consistent ways. Sometimes you end up with variations of prefixes and suffixes that mean exactly the same thing. And the reason we use one over the other is because it sounded cooler.

Yeah, very often it was, hey, let me show off by using one of each. And you're like, son of a bitch. Right, they say it's not good practice necessarily to create hybrid words, but we have tons of hybrid words. There are endless options. And it's just because often it sounds cooler or sounded cooler to whatever scientist

selected that word at the time. Yeah. And it was kind of a flex back then to show off your look. I know both. So, you know, because I my thought was because of my knowledge of, and I was hoping you could help me with the pan, pan seems to be a cross, right? So it's take that's sort of what I was playing. Yeah. So take the take the set as a whole. Like pan is like all the kinds. Here's the pun. Pan is all the kinds of bread. So exactly. And you see how Ed has to drink. But like the full range of gods, the pantheon. Right. Omni tends to be a little bit more granular in that it means each and every. Oh, okay.

So it's the version of all that comes from Omni in Latin is every, it's like almost like if you were gonna go by the police song, you'd use Omni for every little thing she does as magic. You wouldn't go with pan because that would mean all the things done by her are magic. Oh, I like this theory. So Omni tends to be a little bit more granular because it means every little piece that's in there.

So pan would be all the breads and omni would be each slice. Yeah, I can see that. So I'm trying to fold that back in more puns. And Ed, I need trying. And fuck you again. Pan Fakiat. But to fold it back in, I'm thinking that Pan is, again, more global. Just give me all the different, whereas Omni is. I tried all the different and I like all the different like I almost think like pan would be like Star-lord whereas Omni would be Deadpool. Oh, I can see that You know Deadpool has done all like done every whereas yeah Star-lord. He will do all you know

That kind of tracks with like marketing terms that use Omni like Omni channel approach is like you you use everything In its own like granular way instead of the conceptual It's like it's like posting all the same copy on all your social media channels versus like tailoring it to each individual one And the tailoring would be more on me, correct? Exactly. Yeah, okay channel versus yeah, okay No, it's a pan channel, but And that's why because you shouldn't do it that way. Right. Whereas people are at a panel to talk. They're not in an omnal.

You know. So, I noticed you didn't include sapiosexual. Didn't I? I think it may have been an earlier version, but I absolutely should have. Maybe I just assumed everyone would know that one because that's what they're here for. Look at your audience. Yeah.

But no, you're right. I didn't. I'm looking at the, like, hunting through the manuscript, but you're absolutely right. I did not include sapiosexual. Yeah. I was just wondering if that was a editing choice or you you have to have a certain word count or I wasn't I had to cut down like I had like five pages worth of different like kinks and paraphilias and like like affinities across one chapter and my editor may have made like half of them. So whether safety of sexual was on one of them or not, it may have been but I think I went with probably more obscure ones instead. Okay. Or maybe naughtier ones because

one is relatively tame. Say that last part again the the audio kicked out us a little bit. I think it was a little more naughty or a little more scandalous because by all accounts that's relatively tame. Yeah, that makes sense. Am I gone? Yeah. No, you're good. You're good.

I think we at certain times of the day out here on our coast, our internet sometimes will kick out. So by the way, I love that you use Chicago style citations. Like I just thank you. Is that is that a particular like like is this is this your paraphilia? Yes, absolutely. Yeah, I'm more citational sexual. I have to say I have a footnote fetish. Yeah, I was gonna say I feel like I feel like people who have a particular attachment to a to a particular notation style, it's less a paraphilia and more a full blown fetish. Like, no, no. Oh, yeah.

This is a thing. Yeah. This is a button like the Oxford comma is one of mine. I will freely admit like, you know, yeah, I've had to write in too many different styles, like because I'm a journalist, because I'm an editor, because I write books and I write online articles and I write in AP style and I write in Chicago style. I have I have I have attempted to be as neutral as I can. But, you know, we all have our feelings.

Sure. And, you know, I don't get me wrong. I love a good end note, but I'm just not an end note kind of guy. You know, I'm much yeah, much more of a footnote fetishist. So I think Terry Pratchett probably turned me on the most to like footnotes because the way he approaches them is my favorite. I found with... What's his name?

The fellow who wrote Good Omens. Neil Gaiman. Well, that's Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. Okay, so that must have been Pratchett's influence then because I loved his use of footnotes to just rail against English currency. I highly recommend reading every single This World book included, like multiple times, in or out of order. They're lovely. Ed is the, okay, so a fun little peek behind the curtain here for a new person.

Ed reads literature. I don't read fiction. And it's not a moral stance that I have. It's an inability of my brain again. Like there's, I'm good at certain things. And then there's these deep valleys of like, why not? So fiction. Yeah. Yeah. I prefer my I prefer my nonfiction to be shorter form than a book,

which is hilarious because I write nonfiction books. But generally as a consumer, I'm a fiction reader. OK. Yeah. And I think, Ed, you're you're pretty much the same. Yeah. Yeah, very much. And I think Ed, you're pretty much the same. Yeah. Yeah, very much. I will if a nonfiction catches my interest, I can devour it. But most of the time, most of my pleasure reading is fiction. Yeah. Yeah. I like anthropology books. They tend to be very good because they're very narrative based because they're about people. Right, right.

I'm just thinking like Carlo Ginsburg kind of bridges the gap between anthropology and history writing and he keeps it real short too. So Jared Diamond too. Yeah, yeah. Oh, Jared Diamond's amazing. And I'm a sucker for a memoir. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

What's the difference between a memoir and a biography or an autobiography? An autobiography is like, OK, so this is my entire life. Yeah. Up to this point, a memoir is like the memoir of Ulysses S. Grant focuses primarily on here is my military career, starting with right before the Mexican war all the way through the Civil War. Oh, so they take chunks of their life. They checkug, yeah, it's, it's, it's. Got it. Okay, so.

Blood and Sweat Socks. The whole exhaustive story. Gotcha. Blood and Sweat Socks by Mick Foley is a memoir then. Yes, precisely. Got it. Okay. Which is the reason he's been able to do like three memoirs, how many it is he's put out,

is because they're all about different sections of his career. Yeah. Talk about a good writer. So cool. Well, so I a good writer. So, cool. Well, so I have a... Do you have any questions off the top? I feel like I'm just getting the fanboy out here, which is fine. Which, I mean, is awesome. So, I guess the one question I would ask as a public school teacher teaching English,

what would you say is the, how would you recommend getting etymology into the rest of what I'm trying to do? Like do you think this would be something that, because I know I could very easily spend, you know, half of a class period, three days a week doing this by itself. But you know, do you think, what do you think about the idea of bringing more etymology exercises into a classroom setting? Do you think it's worth it or what? Oh, yeah, absolutely.

I think, I mean, Shakespeare naturally lends itself and himself well to discussions of etymology because they help you understand what jokes he's making. Like if he's yeah, if he's making a naughty joke, then knowing the origin of the word helps a lot. There are also like I think it can be beneficial in that in in any poetic context to examine the origins of words to words to make sure that there isn't hidden meaning just in the way that they're applying a root here and there and how it's folding into rhyme. I think it's also kind of nice to just like,

I tend to, if I'm public speaking, if I'm teaching or doing anything along those lines, I like to open up with a quick anecdote and there are so many entertaining and fun facts that you can bring kids in with. So that's how I would probably approach it. It doesn't necessarily need to be like critical to the lessons, but I think giving like instilling an appreciation of meaning into kids early is a nice way to get them to be more intentional with their word choice. Okay, yeah. Awesome. Yeah, thank you for that.

I found that there's a lot of comedians who say things along the lines of... Because the overlap of Damien is comedians, pro wrestling, and Latin, which gives you puns but the there's a lot of comedians who have taken Latin and who value their their experience learning Latin and almost all of them to a person says something along these lines of it taught me the value of a word which when you're doing comedy dropping the perfect word into the perfect spot at the perfect time is that that crystal needle that suddenly lights up the arch for you. You know, we've already referenced him, but but George Carlin, of course, was the master of playing with words and etymology on stage and making people laugh at the same time. So that's good. And I also think there's so much like there's a lot. I would almost I think

etymology is as much a study of history as it is of literature. And it also like plays into hermeneutics very well and authorship. So about hermeneutics, hermeneutics. I should know this off the top of my head. But like it's it's the study of the way authorship, and I hope I'm not wrong, the way authorship applies meaning to, and context applies meaning to a text. At least that is how the word is situated in my head.

I haven't played with it since probably undergrad. But I think it's interesting to be able to couch something in the time period in which it appears. It also makes you a better writer. Like the word hello was not a past standard greeting until the invention of the bell telephone. So if you say, if a character says hello in a book set

in the 17th century, then that's an anachronism, which like I'm not like, I'm not pedantic about such things because I'm here for the story, but it is interesting to think about Yeah, Oh tell me about hello actually cuz yeah, I took hello in again back to Latin in Latin The greeting is usually a salway, which is you know, good health to you or ah way Which is hailing to you right and and it's hail And I always took hello as being hail low there and then just hello hello And then it just turned into that am I off you are you're not incorrect hello

Originally there there were earlier variations like hello and like with different vowels in there. So like H-A-L-L-O or H-O-L-L-O. They were salutations from afar. So you would say those things to a ship that's far away or someone who's on the corner of your farm property. You wouldn't say it like if someone's right next to you, it would be like, hang over there, Like somebody who is right next to you. But and that was why it was applied. Like it was the greeting that Thomas Edison proposed for telephones, because it's like you're literally greeting someone from far away.

And Alexander Graham Bell wanted it to be a hoy. But he lost out on that one. And I'm very sad that he did. I think I'm going to start using ahoy just in person. I really want to bring that back. Oh, go ahead. Just as a side note, what's interesting about the word structure, talking about ahoy and hello turning into hello and those being used over long distance, when you think about it, there's an awful

lot of vowel as compared to consonant going on there. And in the brief time I spent in the Society for Creative Anachronism, one of the things that you learned, I'm sorry, the what society for creative anachronism, think or with less moisture. Yeah. Well, I'm gonna put a pin in that and come back to it and explain it after this. But as somebody who spent a short period of time studying to become a herald in the organization, part of what you would have to do is stand out in the middle of a tournament field and get everybody's attention. And part of the training for that was everybody's attention. And part of the training for that was when you call out to the crowd, you're going to extend all of your vowels because that's where all of the force and volume and carry you're going to get is going to come from. You're not going to get that

from any kind of consonant sound because those are all your lips for your tongue being pressed together. The carry is going to come from from vowels. So hello, you know, hey, and whatever. So I just find it interesting that like, you know, hearing hearing that coming back as oh, and the cultural effect of this is that now, you know, this is this is, you know, through that that link, that chain of events, that's how we came out to the way we greet each other now. Yeah, it's it's harder to get like greetings to sound as loud from a long way away. Yeah, right. Yeah, that makes a lot. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense because a a a and all those are all very open.

I've one's words. Yeah. And it brings your diaphragm in right to to push all that air and all that volume out. Yeah Tell me more about the society and how do I join After I explained the the orgiastica So so there was back I'm trying to remember the year But Ursula K Le Guin had a birthday party years and years and years like back in the 60s talk about parties I wish I could go to right. Yeah, no kidding, right? And in a whole bunch of science fiction fantasy authors and a whole bunch of hippies and a whole bunch of her friends

Decided they were going to theme the party. Wait, wait, wait. Who is Ursula K. Le Guin? Science fiction fantasy author. Thank you. Okay. Theme the party like a...

There you go. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And they were going to theme the party as being a medieval tournament because they were all nerds and they put a lot of time and effort into you know all of the ladies wore you know period gowns that they made themselves for this event and and several of the men at the party

decided you know what if this is gonna be a tournament we got a fight and so they they made essentially wicker swords and made armor kind of crude you know and and held this tournament and everybody had such a good time they said you know what we got to do this again and they formed as kind of half joke half not they formed the society for creative anachronism i love this and nowadays it's a global organization that if you just go online, look up SCA.org, you can find out what kingdom you're living in right now and get in touch with them and you can find out where to go to a meetup and essentially fighter practice is where a lot of this stuff happens. They do their very level best to nowadays do very rigorous historical research into the

clothing you'll see people wearing is as close as they can get to, I am wearing a hooplond from the 1300s and here's the stitching I've done and the fabrics, they use natural fabrics in order to try to read as closely as possible, recreate stuff. They've extended it backward into the Roman Empire, but the cutoff date is up to the year 1600 and so they they have gatherings where guys fight with rattan swords in heavy armor they also have a rapier division for people who don't want to you know get concussion And, uh, you're not joking. Yeah, no, I'm really not. Um, but, uh, and, and yeah, it's, it's for a lot of people, it's an excuse to, you know, go camping with a bunch of people and party real hard, which is fine.

But there are also a whole lot of people who are really, really, uh, very rigorous in their, uh, their historicity. Yeah. So yeah. So this is cool. in their historicity. Yeah. So, yeah. So this is cool. This is like the overlap in the Venn diagram between like historic green actors and the LARPers.

Yes. Cool. Awesome. That's awesome. Also, I looked it up because I didn't want to be wrong. I was getting too far into the weeds with hermeneutics. It simply is the like science of interpretation, like interpreting texts. When I studied it, it often involved looking at authorship to determine meaning in texts.

So it comes from, it's a Greek word. Right. Okay. That's like our entire jam, like looking at authorship. That's what we do, basically. So it's not inherently authorship, but authorship is going to be a big part of interpreting a text because they wrote it. You know, sure, sure. Yeah, it's funny because I thought it was the mugshots from when Peewee Herman was caught in that theater.

Equally logical and scientific. Herman knew Dix. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So makes sense. Cool. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So makes sense. Cool. Um, OK. Oh, I also wanted to come back another one that the kids end up like their their minds get blown when you tell them that it's like it's a relatively new word is escalate. The word escalate didn't exist until after the escalator was created.

Like, I'm serious. I'm not kidding. Wow. What? No kidding. Yeah. Yeah. Like the word. So. I'm not kidding. Wow. What? They come up kidding? Yeah, no, like the word. So like and that appears in all kinds of like historical fiction and whatnot. People will say like the war was escalated and things like that. And since then, it has been used that way. But escalator was coined in the 1890s and the verb escalate isn't recorded

until like the 1920s as a back formation of escalator. But we did have the word Escalade it was also a verb used similarly and it was not a catalyke SUV It was it was a verb meaning to climb specifically to scale a wall because the root word is Scala as in like a ladder Right That's that's the the verbal equivalent to the fact that screws were invented, like hundreds of years before the screwdriver was right. Yeah, like just a wild thing. Yeah. I'm making like a screwing something in my hand gesture.

So the next thing that I want to do for this episode actually is I told you that my daughter I caught her reading it which was awesome and she's really interested in words and wordplay She herself is actually a published author. I'm not. She is. Yeah, I'm pretty stoked by it And so she had some questions that she wanted to ask you guys Well, she wanted to ask you I don't think she cares to ask at anything. No, I don't rate like no But who knows maybe she will like what's it work like working with such an amazing guy stuff like that, so

She wanted to ask you some questions. So I'm going to turn it over This is the first time ever on this show that we've had an author interviewing an author. So I'd like to turn it over to my child, Julia Harmony. Sweet. Welcome, Julia. Hi. Hi. What is your book? What is your book that you've published? There's three that I've been a part of through a program called 916 Ink. Like you write stuff and then give it to them and they just publish it in like

a book where a bunch of other kids have their stories written in there too. So that's awesome. So anthology collections. Yeah, that's legit. Like very cool. That's adult authors do that stuff too. And it's a big deal. So that's awesome. Anthology collections. Yeah, that's legit. Very cool. That's awesome. Adult authors do that stuff too and it's a big deal. That's awesome. Cool. Let's see, what do we want to talk about? I was wondering how you got the idea for your book, Words from Hell.

Thank you. I mentioned this a little bit earlier, but I can get into it a little bit more. Basically, I wrote a kid's book before this, and I had never written a kids book before. The publisher approached me about what the idea, they were like, would you write this children's etymology book? It's called Once Upon a Word. And I found that when I was writing it, there were a lot of dark and gnarly and creepy and naughty secrets that were hidden in many of the words that I wanted to include in the book. And so I wasn't able to include those in the kids book, so I saved them to the side. And then I'm also a TikTok creator. So on my channel, a

lot of times people wanted to know about swear words and they wanted to know about words that had surprising secrets behind them or were secretly naughty. And TikTok is also really interested in bias that's hidden in words. So I wanted to dig into that a good bit too. And there's a surprising amount of bias, like sexism and racism and ableism and transphobia and homophobia buried in a lot of the words we use every day. So that's how I ended up with this. That's really cool. That's like a more adult version of a children's book. Yes, yes, it is.

Yeah, my dad showed me a TikTok that you made the like explaining the etymology of the word de-fenestration. Yes, I like that one a lot. Who would have thought that there were so many people tossed out of windows in Prague over centuries that we have a word specifically for that. Yeah, that's my dad's. I can't say I've ever thrown anyone out a window, but you never know.

Maybe when I'm in Prague, you put in your back pocket. It's always an option. Yeah. When in Rome, as they say. Indeed. So, Julia, what do you like about the book or what have you read so far? Honestly, I've just like flipped around. Really? That's how you're supposed to read it. So you're doing it right. Yeah. Okay. I really like the spellbound chapter.

Oh, yeah, I like that one. That's one of my favorites, too. And honestly, it didn't. I like that chapter because it's it gets into my like fantasy and nerd brain more than I mean, I guess being writing a book about word origins is pretty nerdy as is but like I also get to be a little more fictional and I get to explore like witches and wizards and creepy crawlies and werewolves and things. Sure. Yeah, I really enjoyed your delve into the word zombie. I don't know why. Oh yeah, that's a really interesting one. Yeah, there are there a lot of one of my favorite

things to look into is words, you know, a words. A lot of English comes from Latin and Greek and Germanic languages. So it's cool when you get to see words that have come from cultures outside of the standard European cultures that most of our words come from. And this one has West African and Haitian origin to it. It's very cool. And there's so much story to it

because it's kind of in the same way that we talk about ghosts and ghouls and other creepy things from our own stories. It's evolved a lot over time. So words that were similar to zombie or variations of it have meant phantom or ghost. And it wasn't until later that they were That it was related to like actual walking corpses. It was sort of a more spiritual word

Yeah how did you decide like which categories of words to use in the book for like each chapter and were there any words that like fit into Two or more chapters, but you had to decide which one? Yeah, I ended up with more chapters than I planned to because I wasn't sure where to put certain things. Like I found like I ended up with the the final chapter is called Words at the End of the World and it has words like catastrophe and apocalypse and cataclysm and things like that and I love those words and had initially had some of them because there are a few that are war related.

So I had those in words for war in the war mongering chapter. And then dividing war and crime was a little bit complicated. So I ended up keeping the crime chapter a little more silly, funny. You didn't actually hurt anybody. You just got in trouble for stealing. And then the war chapter is like you actually,

you know, killed people. So it took a lot of it took a lot of finagling. I had the help of an editor who helped me choose which order to put things in. Because initially, I'm trying to remember which one I first had I had first, but the swear words chapter wasn't, the swear words and insults weren't originally at the beginning of the book. I think I had started out with the bias chapters, but my editor was like, hmm, you're kind of too far into the weeds already. So like start out with the accessible funny stuff

and the swear words that everybody knows. And then we'll get into the like deep, dark biases behind everyday words, which I think was very good advice. Yeah. How long did it take to actually like, from the idea of the book to it getting published? Like how long did that take? That's a good question.

I started, so I've worked in, I used to be the content director for Writers Digest. So I've worked in publishing for a good bit of time and I often like give talks giving advice to authors. I give one about like how authors can interact on TikTok, things like that. And I had been writing about etymology for a long time too. So I had a lot of these ideas kind of in my back pocket and like after my, after I wrote my kids book, I wrote up a couple of like book proposals, which are like it's like a one sheet explaining who read this, why they would read it. And then you compare it to like similar titles that are already out so that you can tell the book publisher, you know, why they should why they should publish your book because X amount of people will buy it essentially, you're marketing your book. And so I did that. And one time I was on another podcast,

I was talking about Middle English, and how it informs modern English. And the producer on that podcast happened to be the acquisitions editor for my publisher. So she was like, have you thought about writing another book? And I was like, hey, I have these proposals that I had been thinking about. And, and she asked me to, to write both of them. So I'm going to do, I did Words from Hell first, and then my next one is useless etymology. And it's a little more silly whimsy. And it'll be kind of fun. But this one, I think, let's see, if you if you you bundled, bundled all that into like just like non consecutive time, I'd say it took me probably about six months. That's it.

Yeah. It's, um, because I had been writing about this for a while, I was able to assemble some things that I had written about before. Uh, I used like some of my Tik Tok scripts that I then adapted to the book and then pass blog posts. So that helped too. Okay, I like taking parts off the shelf. Yeah, exactly. And then rewriting them and reframing them and stuff like that. My kids book, it's like 40,000 words that one took me two months and that's because the publisher said that's how long it should take. They were like you have two months go and I was like, okay.

When did you? But I would say I didn't used to be as fast of a writer as I am now. Like because writing is my job and it has been for a long time, there's a, there's a quote you see in like graphic designers. They'll say, you know, why, somebody will ask them, why should I chart, why should I pay $8,000 for a logo that took you five minutes to draw? And the designer will say, well, it took me 10 years to learn how to draw it in five minutes. So kind of the same thing. You get better at it over time. When did you become interested in etymology? Oh, that's, that's a good story.

Actually, I have a good story about this. The boring version of the story is that I studied literature, anthropology, and languages, including Arabic, in my undergrad degree and then journalism after that. And all of that morphed into like an extreme interest and hyperfocus on word origins. But there was an earlier like catalyst in my life. And that was Madame Quinn. And I will tell you about Madame Quinn. She was my French teacher in high school. She was utterly brilliant. We called her Madame Quinn. Her name was Nanette. She was extremely passionate, very interesting. She passed away a

few years ago, but she made such an impact on the community that there's a 5k named after her. She taught me lots of unforgettable lessons, some in French, some in English. In fact, she taught me a lot less French than she did life lessons. But I'm not sorry, I took it anyway. So one time we were reading aloud in French from the book Le Petit Cronce, which was a reading we had done from our for homework that night before and we came across a word that no one in the class knew off the top of their head, they couldn't

define it. She asked like, what does this word mean? And we all stared blankly at other things hoping she wouldn't call on us. And it was really awkward. And then she exploded. Like she was like, she launched into this like epic tirade and she stormed back and forth across the front of the classroom and she was bellowing in French and English and demanding incredulously how on earth we could do this reading and counter a word we didn't know and then not look it up. We had French vocab books, we had worksheets, we had dictionaries, we had Google Translate. Did we just skip over words whose definitions we didn't know when we were reading books in English? Did we not look those up either? How could you meet a word you

didn't know and choose not to learn what it means? And that's like glued to me ever since. Basically like we got nothing done that day. That was the lecture. She was like sweating afterward. We all felt like we'd been hit by a hurricane. But the lesson here is like, never stop being curious. Never let lessons go unlearned when you have the opportunity and resources to dig a little deeper. And that's what led me here.

And it's working out pretty well so far. And Madame Quinn sounds like teacher goals. She was awesome. I have so many stories. She was incredible. I think a lot of people often skip over words that they don't know in reading and they're just like, oh I'll come back to that later. And then they never do. So yeah, no, every time I, every time I think I'm going to do that, every time I'm tempted to do that, she's screaming in my ear and I'm like, ah crap, I have to go look it up. If you don't immediately do it, you'll never do it.

Right, then she's haunting me for the rest of my life. I love it. She's my shouty word conscience. A verbal Jiminy Cricket as it were. Yeah, exactly. This is kind of a random question, but like, why is the book cover red? Just what made you think that? Oh, that's a good question. I actually didn't choose that. When you work with a traditional publisher, so like,'t choose that when you work with a traditional publisher. So like, there are two ways you can publish a book. One is, well, there are multiple ways, but the two like main ones for publishing a book that's purely authored by you is you can self publish it, which is where you like go on Amazon and you create

it and design it and put it out into the world. And then you're also responsible for marketing it and stuff. Or you work with a publisher and they help you put the book together and they'll work with an editor to make it perfect or make it not perfect because I've opened this book and been like, I'm a typo, so not perfect, but as close to perfect as several humans can do. But so we went back and forth on the design a good bit. Like

the first iteration of the book cover I was, I was actually like very unhappy with and I didn't want to be a diva because like generally speaking I like pride myself on being relatively easy going, but the book cover they gave me looked kind of like the cover of the book Freakonomics, which I don't expect you to know what that looks like, but it wouldn't have worked for this. Yeah. That's what I'm talking about. Yeah. Yeah. And for that book, it's a great cover. But yeah, I see why you wouldn't like that. Yeah. Yeah, it looked like a business book. And I was like, oh, and I also didn't want it to look like to like, the title words from hell could feasibly be interpreted as a word that's a little bit of a religious screed. So I also didn't want to go with that. I wanted it to be like dramatic and exciting. And so I gave them a couple of of references, like other books that had like interesting ornamentation and were also focused on words and like big typography.

And yeah, I ended up with and I don't know if you've seen it, but it looks like this. I like that you can read it across the room. I love that. That's actually really great design there. That's cool. It's good. My favorite thing about it though is in the border around the title of the book, there are hidden objects. There are, let's see, one, objects. There are, let's see, one, two, non-repeating, three, four, five, six, depending on whether you determine that something is like its own distinct thing. But yes, there are, indeed, there is a very naughty one on there too. So I maybe don't point that one out to your friends. Okay. Yeah. When we're done with this, I'll definitely go looking for that. your friends. Okay, yeah, when we're done with this, I'll definitely go looking for that.

Yes, but there is, there's the, the one of the hidden, the hidden naughty one is, it's a lady part and when I show men the book and ask them to identify what it is, they're like, it's a nut, it's an acorn, but it is not. And when I show women what it is, they're like, oh, I know what that is. So if you were to write your own book, do you know what it would be about? I have a lot of like, random story ideas that like, pop into my head, and I'm like, oh, that's a great idea. I'm going to write about that. And then I open up a Google Doc, I start writing about it. Maybe I get a couple of days in and then I just abandon it because I'm like, oh, I have another idea. And then it just becomes lost in my archive Google Docs. I have done that before too. Sorry, go ahead. I know that feel that's

That's the biggest reason I've never been able to finish anything is because a new idea shows up and yeah Yeah there's the There's a in November actually is national novel writing month And that's when like if you have one of those ideas that you want to come back to And that's when like, if you have one of those ideas that you want to come back to, you can work with this community of other writers, and you challenge everybody challenges one another to write. I want to say it's like 2000 words a day, just to like get something on paper, and the, the tip I receive is like the most helpful tip I've received is let yourself write badly. And that's also gotten me through book drafts before too is like, just get the words on the page. You can make them good later, but if you don't have anything, then you don't have anything. So definitely recommend there's National Novel Writing Month. And then if it were nonfiction, there's also not it's National Nonfiction Writing Month. So it's like nanofine, I write right now like that. Yeah. And they're both good. I did. I did National Novel Writing Month once.

I have a really bad draft of a sci-fi comedy that like lives in my Google Docs. I don't know if I'll ever come back to it, but I'm super happy that I did it because it like proved to myself that I could do it. That you had the story in you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. November's not thinking through like like it's one thing to know, like the characters in the arc and the beginning and the end, but like all the messy middle, as they say, is the hardest part. Yep. What was like one of the first words that you were like, oh, let's put this in the book.

Oh, that's a good question. I talked about this one earlier, but it was the word fascinate, which is connected to, I feel like I shouldn't say this one to you. I read it. But, yeah. Okay. And it's not, it actually isn't that naughty because the thing that it's named after

is simply like an object that charms or fascinates or or entrances someone in a way that is like interesting. But the object that was often associated with that and the the god, Fasinous, or Fasinous, your dad is gonna like knock the spelling or the pronunciation out of the park better than I can. But he he his symbol was a large boy part. So male, male member, male member. So that one that one was like, well, that has to go in another one. Let's see. I'm trying to think of other ones that are like surprisingly naughty. Oh, yeah. OK, gym, the word gymnasium,

literally it comes from a Greek word that means naked and a gymnasium is a place to train naked because in Greek society, when you went to like train for the Olympics or for any other sport, you would do so naked and oiled up. So a gymnasium literally means a place to train naked, which is a little funny that we use that word for a place where you go to school to do, you know, P.E. and stuff these days. Yeah, that feels a little wrong, but

linguistic creep is a real thing. Linguistic creep is a real thing. Were there any words that like you added as a last minute thing? Like, oh, I don't really want to, but I should probably put in the time to sort of thing. Yeah, I remember. Let's see. There was one in particular. I think I didn't spend enough time. Like I had written a very short blurb on the word death, which being such a large concept, my editor was like, you have two sentences on the word death in this book. That's probably a bit of an oversight, huh? And so I revisited it. And there isn't, it's not that interesting of a word in terms of what it means. It's an old English word

that means death, and it's always meant death. So I pulled in some narrative. It's ancientness and the consistency of its meaning reflects how pertinent it is to our lives and to time. And then I pulled in the way it's appeared in literature and tucked on some of those threads a little bit. I also, so I was hesitant to include too many like, religious terms, but I knew that I needed to include words like hell and Satan, which are interesting ones too, because those words don't appear in any original forms of the Bible, like Satan isn't a character in the Bible and hell isn't a place. It's like four different ideas that were translated using a Germanic word after it got through Latin and Greek. So yeah.

Yeah, I could spend some time talking with you about the etymology of hell, for sure. As a church-going Catholic who looks at many of my fellow religionists like, you don't read, do you? Yes. Have you read the book you're talking about? Can we actually go to the terms that are in here? And talking about TikTok, McClellan, I forget his first name right now, but he does a lot of stuff on misinformation and disinformation about the Bible and translation and all that kind of stuff. And I'm like a huge fan of his stuff because of that.

That's excellent. I love that kind of discourse because there's so much in interpretation and it's been reinterpreted and reinterpreted until it's this gigantic game of religious telephone. And translated sometimes very badly. Yeah, or with more often with an agenda in mind, you know? Yes, that yeah, definitely. Instead of pushing for another chapter for the words at the end of the world part. Why is it like an epilogue? You know, I think it was because it was a little bit shorter, and I wanted to keep it

a little bit like lighter and let the book sort of slide down rather than giving it a heart and stop. And I, I also thought about like writing something, I don't know, philosophically profound at the end of the book. And I decided to let the words and their origins speak for themselves instead. Have it go out with a whimper rather than a bang.

Yeah, sure. To make a literary reference, yeah. Right, right, but then, you know, yeah, exactly. I didn't want to risk the final words being something that was about me when it's really about the words themselves. So we end up with an actual bang with like the apocalypse and stuff. Nice. When you like originally had the leftover words and bits of etymology that were like, oh, let's not put this in a children's book. What category, I guess, were they in for the book?

Was it mostly the witchcraft stuff? Was it mostly the... Kite Honestly, it was mostly the sexual kind of things. There were a lot of words that had that in it. Also a bias was also a huge one. There were a lot of words that had really complicated biases embedded into them that like I didn't think were particularly pertinent to the lightheartedness of the kids book,

you know, digging into a word that has embedded sexism in it and telling kids about that, I didn't think made a lot of sense in context of that book. Maybe there's a world in which there's a kids book that challenges them to think a little bit more about that kind of thing. But it was a little tough to translate it. And especially the the entries in the kids book were a lot shorter. So you know, there was only so much I could go into the history of what we were talking about, like eugenics, for example, in in a 200 word children's book blurb.

Um, on pages 114 and 115. There's a compound insults, just like a couple of. Yeah. Why just the way you asked that? Honestly, it's because so I was on I'm I probably shouldn't admit to this, but I use Reddit relatively regularly and I noticed that. But you two, OK, it's oh, Yeah, I'm terminally addicted to Reddit. I shouldn't be, but yeah. Some of my first, like some of the first times I ever posted about Edomology anywhere online

were on Reddit and that community was very like welcoming and curious and interesting. So there was one, there was a programmer named Colin Morris who posted on Reddit. He's a Redditor as well. He selected a range of compound pejorative elements or compound insult pieces and mapped the pairings by the frequency of their use on Reddit. Due to the site's quote unquote virtue of being uninhibited in its profanity and on the cutting edge of new coinages.

This included words like fart goblin or inhibited in its profanity and on the cutting edge of new coinages. And so this included words like fart goblin or, you know, ass bag or something along those lines. So I have in the book like a pairing, like you have the first part of the word that you can pick and then the second part of the word that you can pick. So I'm particularly fond of butt muffin myself. Oh, I like that one. That's pretty good. Yeah. Though that one could be a term of end muffin myself. Oh, I like that one. That's pretty good. Yeah. Though that one could be a term of endearment.

Could be. Could be. Oddly. Could be. Mm-hmm. Yeah, a lot of these words are like, you could take them figuratively, but you don't really want to. Yeah.

Mm-hmm. I mean, they all more or less mean the same thing. They're just creative ways of harming one another emotionally. One of those things we do very well as humans, no matter the culture. Right. I think one of the recurring ones that was in Colin's original chart, I could be calling this incorrectly, but some of my favorites from that were ass wagon and Shit given were really big. Oh, I've given a lot. Yeah, that's that's it. That's a personal favorite that one rent-free in my head I Wank badger

You know what I hadn't seen that one so much hearing that they just moved to the top of my list. It makes sense. I like that. That's awesome. Yeah. You could also probably, sorry, you could probably also create a chart that's a little less raunchy. Like the chart that I created, the little exercise, has a lot of very salty words in it, but you could do it with less vulgar ones as well. Get real creative with it. What made you take the time aside to do the... What is a cob and cobweb and how is it different from a spiderweb part? Honestly, that's one of my favorite things to write about. And that was originally inspired by one of my blog posts and then a TikTok video that I did about like Halloween

themed words. I love like, I'm, I'm kind of a witchy person. Like I like, I like spooky stuff. I like, you know, the like creatively creepy and fun things about that. I also write horror short stories occasionally. And I've had a couple of those do relatively well. But I liked that one because when it comes to like spooky stuff, one of my favorite things about the spooky chapter is that it, a lot of the words in it are more Germanic and more, or more Norse or more Dutch or whatever else, they're all Germanic languages, but they're, which is a little bit different. A lot of the words, about 60% of the English languages like Latin or Greek derived, or sorry, 60% Latin, five-ish percent Greek, and then a lot of Latin words are also from Greek. So you get a lot of the classics. And longer words tend to be more

Latin and Greek in origin, but I really like old English words because they tend to follow a different logic than a lot of our other word constructions do. And I like the logic that goes into this. We were talking earlier about how old English words are very blunt. They're very straightforward. Compounds tend to say exactly what they are. And I liked the cobweb and spider one because there were lots of words for spider. And the fact that there were so many reveals probably that, A, there were a lot of spiders and that those

have been a thing that we've been afraid of for a long time. And it also, it's one of those things where you're sitting there and you're like, why is that a cobweb and not a spiderweb? Or why is why is it called a cob at all? It doesn't seem to have anything to do with corn on the cob. And that's true. So that's, that's where that's really my bread and butter when it comes to writing about word origins and what I'm excited about writing more of in my next book. to writing about word origins and what I'm excited about writing more of in my next book. Next book? What's the next book? It's called useless etymology and it's based on a blog that I've been writing for a long

time. Okay. And it's more about like whimsical, curious and oddities of the English language. And it's not always word origins necessarily. Sometimes it's like, so there are a couple of phenomenons in English called egg corns and malapropisms. And those are both when you say the wrong word when you're trying to say a word like,

I'm trying to, why am I blanking out the top of my head? But for example, sometimes people will say, chomping at the bit, and this one is more accepted these days, but a commonly cited egg corn is chomping at the bit versus champing at the bit. Because chomping makes perfect sense, but champing was the original term because it was more specifically the word for the noise a horse made when it was chomping on its bit. I'm chomping has taken over in common discourse to the extent that it's mostly accepted.

And that's an ed corn because it makes sense in context, whereas a malapropism is where you say the wrong word entirely. And an example of that would be like, if you're trying to say, and here's another Reddit reference, if you're trying to say bon appétit, like the French word, you would say bone apple tea. And there's a separate about that. So a malapropism is a more incorrect and sillier sounding accident. And it's named after a character named Mrs. Malaprop from an 18th

century play. And she made all kinds of, of word errors like that. So spoonerisms would be a subcategory of malapropism, wouldn't they? Yes, exactly. I recall, I'm, a spoonerism is specifically transposing sounds, correct? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like, let's see, cyst my, or let's see, cyst my mop instead of mist my stop or something like that. Yeah, that's that. Yeah. Named for a professor. And I don't remember what university he was at, but who famously did that like all the time, just as as a like, just the way his brain was, you know, slightly miswired. He would do that frequently. And so it became a spoonerism. That's funny. I like that. That's really interesting.

Author to author, I would absolutely love to see your next book out and really like talking with you. Thank you for your time. Thank you so much. This has been so much fun. I can't wait to read your books. I would love to read your stories that are already published. And I can't wait to read your first full book or anthology that comes out. Thank you. Thank you for the questions. Yeah, thank you for joining us, Julia. It was awesome. Absolutely. Well, thanks again to author Julia Harmony for coming in and bringing her expertise in a way that I could not. Friend of the show.

Friend of the show. Julia Harmony. Enemy of her dad. You know, I wouldn't say enemy. I would say nemesis. There's not necessarily animosity. True. And I do deserve it. You know, yeah.

Respectful contention. Quite so. Quite so. So, if there's anything you'd like to say to her, we can certainly record that here. And I will play that for her when we publish this. So... Well, Julia is incredibly cool. I'm so happy she joined me. And I am overwhelmed and humbled by the great questions she asked I've been a journalist for a long time and I don't know that mine would have been as good so damn fine work and I cannot wait to hear and read what she's written already and then she can share with you any and all stories. So cool. Perfect.

Well, I think this is a good stop good stopping point for us. And then we can interview you some more in another episode because I still have a mountain of questions to ask. And I know Ed's got stories about malapropisms that are going to be all kinds of fun to add in. So normally this is where we say, hey, what are you reading? But I think all of us are reading Words from Hell by Jess Ferris. So I would like to just ask Ed,

have you gleaned anything from this? Well, I've gleaned that there are two books I now need to add to my classroom library. One of them will be accessible to my sixth grade students, and one of them will be in the forbidden section, or the restricted section, I should say, up on the shelf where all of my university-level history books are. But yeah, this has been fascinating so far and just a hell of a lot of fun. Thank you so much for joining us. This has been great. Thank you both so much. This has been

a blast. If you like other books in this vein, I recommend Because Internet by Gretchen McCullough. It's more of a linguistics thing, but it's about how people talk on the internet. And then the etymologicon by Mark Fortseith and nine nasty words by John McWhorter. Good stuff. Oh, okay. Those are awesome recommendations. And I don't remember the author's name, but have you seen the history of English in a hundred words? I have seen it, but I have not read it. Okay. It's awesome. I recommend it very highly. Very cool. You got it. It I have not read it. Okay, it's it's it's awesome. I Recommend it very highly Got it. It's on my list now and last I do want to bring it back around because we've got you on as a guest and I want to make sure that you get

The the final plug in can you tell folks the title of your book where they can find it and How many gifts they should use it as as terms of stocking stuffers and breakup gifts because we are heading toward those seasons. Excellent. Read Words from Hell. It's available in any major bookseller, Amazon, Barnes and Noble. I like to recommend people use bookshop.org because it supports indie bookstores or your local indie. If it's not in stock at your local indie, you can ask them to order it in. I highly recommend sending it to your friends, enemies, and book banning politicians. Very nice. Nice. Oklahoma listeners, you know where that is. All right, cool. Well, Jess Zafar,

Safara, sorry. Thank you so much. I'm just still glowing over what I witnessed for the last half hour. Thank you so much for joining us. Author, word nerd and fellow interviewee with my daughter. For Geek History of Time, I thank you for being here. I'm Damian Harmony. And I'm Ed Lailach. And again, thank you so much for joining us. And everybody else keep rolling 20s.