The history of antidotes and elixirs is a world where myth, magic, and medicine intermingle. The 25th anniversary of Antidote seems like a perfect time to explore the ways in which antidotes have fired the human imagination and enriched our language.

Every once in a while, a word that gets passed from one language to another can get passed right back, like a ball in a game of ping-pong. This Word Stories instalmnet shines a spotlight on this phenomenon, by showing how the game can be played out between English and French.

In today’s instalment, we look at some words that have stretched and drifted in directions so unpredictable they’ve rotated a full 180 degrees away from their original connotations.

Modern English is the result of a grand linguistic experiment in creative packaging, in that the roots of its grammar are characteristically Germanic, but its vocabulary is dominated by the classical heritage of Greece and Rome. It’s been a long time since English-speaking children learned Greek and Latin in school, but the effects of traditional “Western” classical education are still all around us. Greek and Latin have shaped about half the words English speakers use today, including almost all of our technical and scientific terminology. This Word Stories instalment looks at what can happen when this profusion of Greek and Latin roots gets tangled up in English, for example in the popular temptation to use Latin endings for words that look Latin, like octopus.