1343: /’mīgrent/ by Tiana Nobile

The Slowdown: Poetry & Reflection Daily · Sep 2, 2025 · 6m

Transcript

I’m Maggie Smith and this is The Slowdown.

One of my favorite things about words is their history. As a writer, I’m curious about the words I choose for my poems. When I look up the origin of a word, it’s like unfolding a map, and seeing the journey that word has taken to reach me. Suddenly I know it better. It feels special to me, like a friend.

Let’s take the word migrant, for example—a word I’ve used in a poem. Migrant comes from the Latin migrans, meaning "changing place." So a migrant is one who moves from place to place. The adjective migratory is related to migrant. As in…