The Endless Knot
Summary: Aven & Mark discuss etymology, history, literature, language, and cocktails, and the sometimes surprising connections between them all.
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- Artist: Mark Sundaram & Aven McMaster
- Copyright: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Podcasts:
We talk to Edward Watts about his new book Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell into Tyranny, which covers the history of Rome from the 3rd century BCE to the rise of Octavian to princeps. Our conversation ranges across questions of Roman identity, our fascination with transitional periods, and the connections between Roman history and contemporary politics.
Episode 66: Writing Myth with Amalia Dillin
Episode 65: Reindeer Games
Episode 64: The History of the English Language with Kevin Stroud
Episode 63: Sound Education Conference Report
From modern words for ghost, to Latin and Greek terms for spirits, to ghost words that haunt dictionaries, we explore some spooky etymologies and tell some ancient ghost stories.
Episode 61: Classing up our Languages?
We report on our trips to EduCon, VidCon, Iceland, & England.
Quick Announcement
The etymology of 'sublime' takes us through a discussion of the Gothic, Neo-Classical, and Romantic periods, the origins of the Romance languages, the roots of romantic love, and more.
This episode, we travel to Calgary, Alberta for a conference, and try some very questionable "ancient" potables! Aven takes a microphone on the road, and chats with a bunch of classicists about Roman beer, barley water, Homeric kykeon, conference papers, social media, and more!
We sail the high seas and surf the interwebs for this episode all about the etymology of pirate-related words and the coinage of a new term for stealing videos. We also cover the development of copyright law, the reasons pirates say "Arrrr!", and what Julius Caesar did to his kidnappers.
Episode 56: Linguistic Discrimination, with The Vocal Fries
In part two of our miniseries on pets, we cover cats, monkeys, birds, and more. Find out the surprising origins of the word for parrot, what medieval people named their cats, and what bird was symbolic of the Virgin Mary.
What makes an animal a pet? Who kept pets in the ancient and medieval worlds? What kinds of animals were they? And why are all the words for pets in English of (mostly) unknown origin?! We start a mini two-part series with a general discussion of ancient and medieval pets, and then some great stories about some Very Good Dogs.
