Code Words: Tracing how computer-science vocabulary inherited older meanings

Duration 3:28.768. Curator transcript pending; a WebVTT track is wired for timed captions as soon as final narration text is supplied.

The Story of "algorithm". From personal name to impersonal procedure to mythic agent. The word began as a personal name, dissolved into an impersonal mathematical procedure, and has now returned to a personified force—revealing how technological abstraction inevitably cycles back to anthropomorphic myth when systems exceed human comprehension.

Duration 4:03.776. Curator transcript pending; a WebVTT track is wired for timed captions as soon as final narration text is supplied.

The Story of "bug". From Swelling Earth to Silicon Glitch. The word bug reveals how human anxiety physically swells into language, transforming bodily protrusion into supernatural dread, then into creeping pests, and finally into the invisible errors that haunt our machines.

Duration 3:59.167. Curator transcript pending; a WebVTT track is wired for timed captions as soon as final narration text is supplied.

The Poison That Spreads. From Venom to Virality. The word virus completes a remarkable semantic inversion: from ancient poison to modern aspiration, the mechanism of exponential spread remains constant while the valence flips entirely — what was once feared as toxic slime is now pursued as cultural power.

Duration 4:04.400. Curator transcript pending; a WebVTT track is wired for timed captions as soon as final narration text is supplied.

The Story of "cookie". From hearth fire to hidden data. A word born from fire and ripening gradually cooled into data, revealing how language repurposes tangible domestic comfort to name intangible digital tracking.

Duration 3:09.733. Curator transcript pending; a WebVTT track is wired for timed captions as soon as final narration text is supplied.

The Story of "bit". From Cleaving Flesh to Toggling Logic. The journey from physical cleaving to digital abstraction reveals how language miniaturizes violence into information, turning the act of splitting matter into the foundation of computation.

Duration 4:20.267. Curator transcript pending; a WebVTT track is wired for timed captions as soon as final narration text is supplied.

The Story of "avatar". From Divine Descent to Digital Embodiment. Avatar reveals that digitization is not a rupture with antiquity but a fulfillment of an ancient pattern: we continuously build new vessels to make the invisible self visible, crossing from abstraction into embodiment just as deities once crossed from heaven to earth.

Duration 4:21.803. Curator transcript pending; a WebVTT track is wired for timed captions as soon as final narration text is supplied.

The Story of "mouse". From Whisker to Screen: How a Timid Rodent Became a Digital Hand. The journey of 'mouse' reveals how human cognition recruits familiar animal kinematics to domesticate abstract technologies, turning a timid rodent into an extension of the human hand while simultaneously bleaching its biological reality into metaphors for triviality and timidity.