The letter C has split personalities. Sometimes it has a hard K sound, and sometimes it has a soft S sound. Sometimes it's a part of letter combinations whose pronunciations vary from word to word. The causes of these split personalities are rooted in a complicated history that begins in Ancient Phoenicia.

Words for ‘tea’ in languages around the world fall into one of two etymological categories: te-derived and cha-derived. Both are ultimately derived from different dialects of Chinese. Based on the geolinguistic distribution of these two etymological categories, we can learn a lot about the history of the tea trade itself.

According to literary critic Raymond Williams, culture is ‘one of two or three most complicated words in the English language.’ Today's narrative traces the word's unexpected origins as a farming term to its social and anthropological senses today. Along the way, we'll explore many different perspectives on what a ‘culture’ really is is.