Lacuna, Are You Ready for This?

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Christina Shoei says, do you have a favorite word in history of? Oh, mediocre was good. There are words that I have to look up every time, like, lacuna. It's a bookbinding term, meaning a chunk of the glued pages that have detached from the spine and are missing. But why remember a destructive love affair? Here at Lacuna, we have perfected a safe, effective technique for the focused erasure of troubling memories.

The brilliant and dazzling Helen Zaltzman, host of The Allusionist podcast and person who technically for a living researches the origins of language and thus is an etymologist, visits Alie's apartment to chat about various word origins, gender in language, the Bible a.k.a. The Oxford English Dictionary, origins of the filthiest slang, emoji decoding, mediocrity, step parents, babies wearing glasses, Greek kimonos, the romance of languages and the fundamental truth that language is always changing whether you want it to or not. Also tomatoes, pliable boobs, avocados, and fish trails.

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