From water to demons
Plus: a word of the day
Conjugate That
Episode: "Lissome" | Podcast: Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day | 1m42s
Word of the day podcast from a venerable American dictionary brand finally tackles one of my favourite words. "Lissome", meaning flexible, supple, graceful or — more rarely — nimble — first entered English in the 18th century. It was a corruption of the similar word lithe, a 14th century coinage with Old English roots. This episode squeezes definitions, etymology and several usage examples into a sub two minute package. The whole show is full of small gems like this and even the widest vocabulary can be improved by it (1m42s)
Deep Water
Episode: "Allergic To Water" | Podcast: Beautiful Strangers | 20m59s
Personal story from a woman who is allergic to water. A bath is anything but relaxing for her. "Looking at the water is like looking at a vat of acid". When her symptoms started in her early twenties, she was in counselling for serious trauma (there's mention of child abuse and sexual assault here). Contact with water made her skin sting as if "a million hot poker needles" were being inserted at once. Donated plasma eventually enabled her to take a bath once every two weeks with minimal pain (20m59s)
Begone Demon
Episode: "Six Flags Newsboys And Disability Demons" | Podcast: Spiritual PTSD | 23m52s
First person podcast hosted by "a recovering exorcist and Christian" (using some explicit language). As a former child pastor in a pentecostal church, he spent a lot of his youth on church related outings. Here, he tells the story of a visit to a theme park when he was 14, which led to the "discovery" that he was a teenage exorcist. Some of the anecdotes related are pretty horrific, such as when he tried to "heal" a disabled person. While not minimising the hurt he caused, the host managed to find the funny side in his religious past (23m52s)
