142. Bizarro

Kyle and Emily are embroiled once more in Seth’s conjurations of the Lexiconicon when he introduces them to this week’s word: bizarro. Seth traces this word’s tangled roots from French to Italian to Spanish (and maybe Basque?) only as a courtesy to what lies ahead.

Summoning linguists Parkvall and Androutsopoulos, Seth reveals the “O-word taxonomy”—sharing everything from agentive weirdos and apocoped typos to parasitical kiddos and paragogic Jackos. But firstly, us meet the DC villain thatself, Bizarro, Superman’s backwards-talking, cube-planet-living, worstest-friend-having foil, whose legacy extends far beyond the Silver Age of Comics that birthed him.

And all of this leads Seth to introduce the works of Carlton Mellick III and other authors pushing narrative past the edge of coherence and into something much stranger—where logic is boring, skeletons crawl out of orifices, and your partner’s insides might just contain your soulmate. It’s not just fiction. It’s bizarro.

Join us every week as we explore the fascinating origins and meanings of words, uncovering the hidden stories behind language and how it evolves over time, for language enthusiasts and etymology buffs alike.

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Produced by⁠ ⁠Seth Gliksman⁠⁠, Kyle Imperatore, and Emily Moyers

Main theme and accompanying themes by Kyle Imperatore