From etumos—‘true’—etymology is, etymologically, the study of truth.
Today, it refers to the study of the origin and development of words. But this is not to diminish its significance. After all, most of our thinking and all of our writing is done in, well, words. And so whoever understands etymology also understands a foundational element of thought itself: how and why we bracket and conceptualise the clutter of our inner mental stream of consciousness into neat identifiers to help us understand and communicate it all.
Adam Aleksik is “The Etymology Nerd”, a linguist with over 2 million followers across his online platforms, making him perhaps the world’s first “linguistics influencer”. His short videos on esoteric word facts are extremely popular, and he recently announced a forthcoming book on the way that social media is transforming our language.
He joins me today to talk all things linguistic: euphemisms, dysphemisms, slang, TikTok, and how they caught the Unabomber.
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