Over the past few years, I’ve found myself working on the 1688 medical dissertation by Johannes Hofer in which the word nostalgia was coined. What was bafflingly unclear was why Hofer had formed the term the way he did. Words that end in -algia (from the Greek algon, “pain”) typically name in the first half of the word the localization of the pain. Thus cephalgia means a “headache” (kephalos = head). Nostalgia would mean a pain in the nostos (homecoming). Surely that can’t be right. One day, while musing on the problem, I heard echo the lines:
In the proem of the Odyssey, nostos and algea appear in subsequent lines, in proximate metrical positions. It would only have been fitting that the word was derived from the poem dedicated to Odysseus, the classic paradigm of the nostalgic. The proem would have been known by heart by...
