Episode Details

A 1942 Edward Hopper painting, an Australian dragonfly, an illegal metal-detecting crime, and the Wi-Fi router in your living room all share one word: Nighthawk. This episode traces the biography of a concept, starting with the crepuscular, camouflaged, silent-flying bird itself and following how humans hijacked its identity to express their own relationship with the dark.

We move through the mood of Hopper's diner and the jazz and blues musicians who claimed the name, from the Coon-Sanders Original Nighthawk Orchestra of the 1920s and bluesman Robert Nighthawk to Coleman Hawkins and a 2002 rap duo, then into films from 1921 silents to Ron Peck's 1978 gay-themed drama. The conversation covers the 1917 Supermarine Nighthawk fighter, the radar-scattering Lockheed F-117, Honda motorcycles and Netgear routers, Marvel and DC vigilantes, sports teams from lacrosse to bobsled, the aggressive cricket tactic associated with Stuart Broad, and nighthawking, the theft of buried artifacts under cover of darkness.

• Why the hermit crab is a useful metaphor for how a word changes shells
• Why naming a router after a stealth jet is aspirational branding rather than lazy marketing
• How the cricket nighthawk flips the defensive night watchman into an attacker
• How convergent naming gave a dragonfly the same label as a bird
• Why a word with dozens of meanings may be a linguistic success rather than a failure