On Monday’s edition of the quiz-show “Mastermind” one of the questions concerned etymology. What word, the host enquired, originated from the Greek words for “homecoming” and “pain”?

(As an aside, I have to say I knew the second root at once, but the first one escaped me.)

The word is, of course, nostalgia: that very familiar feeling many of us feel towards days long past. The school days, for instance, or even the past eras we didn’t get to experience in person; the days of Rome, or the Victorian years. We long to go back to them, so that we might experience some, well - some pain.

It’s perfectly natural, you see. It’s in the dictionary.

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