A femur was a production of IHurt Radio.

Since I started working on this show, which was longer ago than I care to admit.

Hi, I'm Alex Williams.

I've been asked a lot of questions, good questions, but sometimes hard to answer.

The basic, what do you talk about? The trickier, why is that interesting?

And the pointed, why is it important? But let's slow down a second. If something is ephemeral,

what does that actually mean?

I tell people what I'm working on and they're like, effemmer what?

That's Sarah Wasserman, who's made a career out of answering questions like these.

My name is Sarah Wasserman, and I am a professor of English and this other thing called Material Culture Studies at the University of Delaware. And I am finishing a book about ephemera. It's called The Death of Things.

A good place to begin, as you might expect, is to pull the word apart.

It comes from a Latin, Greek combination word. So epi, meaning of or on, as we have in Epicurious, something like that.

Epita. Epilogue. Epidemics. And Hemera meaning day. And the word was originally used to signify things that basically only lived for one day. So the mayfly was the classic example.

In a single day, or sometimes a long weekend, depending on the particular species,

the mayfly transforms into its adult winged stage, flies around, mults, mates, lays its eggs,

and dies.

Over 2,000 species of Mayfly make up the aptly named order, ephemoroptera.

In the most rigid connotation, ephemera refers to paper.

It's come to mean mainly printed material that doesn't stick around for long.

So we use it to think about broadsides, ticket stubs, brochures, pamphlets, flyers.

Envolvelobes, lottery tickets, paper dolls, maps, post-it notes.

You can drive yourself crazy trying to make an exhaustive list of all the printed material that passes through people's hands.

...