Episode Details

Why do perfectly good words like opprobrium, petrichor, and sesquipedalian fall out of the language while weaker ones thrive? This episode diagnoses the disease: from fossil words trapped in idioms to culturally abandoned terms that still work perfectly. We explore what kills a word—hyper-specificity, phonetic ugliness, register mismatch—and which ones are worth pulling back down from the lexical attic. Plus: how petrichor made a comeback from obscurity to ubiquity, and what that tells us about reviving the rest.