Our language - profane, sublime and everything in between - holds hidden truths about our cultural heritage, our current reality, and who determines it. Etymology, the study of the origins of words, can unlock this knowledge.

Jane Caputi has spent her career unearthing the history and meaning of words, our language, cultural beliefs, and how we know what we know - with a particular focus on sex, violence and the destruction of our natural environment.

In this episode we talk about Jane’s new book, Call Your Mutha’: A Deliberately Dirty-Minded Manifesto for the Earth Mother in the Anthropocene, in which she critically reimagines The Anthropocene, The Age of Man, from an eco-feminist perspective. Not for the tender-eared, in this sweeping conversation Jane breaks down the origins of the term motherf***er, explains why Mother Earth is not a metaphor, spells out the difference between omnipotence and cunctipotence, and much more.