Episode Details

What do a Welsh fortress, a Nobel laureate's novel, a Mongolian stone building and a stoner comedy have in common? The name White Castle. This episode uses the Wikipedia disambiguation page for the phrase to show how language stretches over time. It starts with descriptive place names for castles in Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Mongolia and Ukraine, where a pale, visible building served as a landmark before maps were common.

We follow the phrase from buildings to communities, including White Castle, Louisiana, named after a local plantation house, a case of semantic bleaching. Then it detaches from places completely. We look at why the burger chain chose words suggesting purity and strength after The Jungle made people afraid of ground beef, and at Orhan Pamuk's 1985 novel, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, a 2013 Burmese film, a 2008 Jack Flanders radio drama, and a whiskey from the Philippines.

• Vernacular versus vanity naming for medieval fortresses
• How a plantation house gave its name to White Castle, Louisiana
• Semiotics behind the White Castle hamburger chain's branding
• The White Castle as a metaphor in Orhan Pamuk's novel
• Why context matters when searching for a word online