Juggernaut: Indian Temple Or Unstoppable Force?

Science Diction

Science Friday and WNYC Studios

Friday, Society & Culture, Science, Origin, Culture, Words, History, Word, Language

4.8 • 610 Ratings

🗓️ 23 November 2021

⏱️ 19 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 2014, a grad student in Kolkata named Ujaan Ghosh came across an old book by a Scottish missionary. And as Ghosh paged through the book, he noticed the missionary kept using a word over and over: Juggernaut. But the missionary wasn’t using it the way we do today—to mean an unstoppable, overwhelming force. He was using it to talk about a place: a temple in Puri, India. So Ghosh dug further, and as he grasped the real story of where the English word, juggernaut, had come from, he realized there was just no way he could keep using it. A transcript of this episode is being processed and will be available within a week. Guests: Chris Egusa is an audio producer and 2020 KALW Audio Academy fellow. Dylan Thuras is co-founder of Atlas Obscura, and host of the Atlas Obscura podcast. Ujaan Ghosh is a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Footnotes & Further Reading: Read Ujaan Ghosh’s article on the origins of the word “juggernaut.” Learn more about Jagannath Temple in Atlas Obscura. Listen to more episodes of the Atlas Obscura podcast. Credits: This episode was a collaboration between Science Diction and Atlas Obscura. It was produced by Johanna Mayer and Chris Egusa, and edited by Elah Feder and John DeLore. Daniel Peterschmidt is our composer, and Danya AbdelHameid fact checked the episode. It was mixed by Luz Fleming.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey there. So today, as usual, we are talking about a word, juggernaut. But I'm going to have some company telling the story.
0:10.2	Hi, Johanna. Hey, Dylan. Dylan Thuris is co-founder of Atlas Obscura, which is a really cool, like, magazine, experience podcast. How do you describe Atlas Obscura? It's a guide to the world's
0:23.4	hidden wonders in many forms, as a website, as a book, as a podcast, yeah. Yes, and you were the host of that
0:30.1	podcast. And each episode of the show is about a particular place. And the thing that surprised me
0:36.9	and why we're doing this together is that the word
0:39.0	juggernaut, it comes from a place. And once you learn the story behind it, it kind of changes how you
0:47.7	think about the word. So today, we are going to look at how this word juggernaut and this place are connected. Here we go.
0:57.7	Captain Crunch, front of the TV, 8 a.m. or whatever time. And yeah, that was just like my ritual every morning.
1:05.6	This is Chris Agusa. He's my colleague here at Science Diction, and he's talking about Saturday morning cartoons.
1:12.8	I would not miss it, and I would just, like, for two or three hours, just be in bliss.
1:19.7	And his favorite show.
1:21.5	Oh, it was definitely X-Men.
1:23.1	And there was one bad guy that Chris still remembers.
1:27.3	Be Juggernaut Be Juggernaut.
1:29.9	Juggernaut was just this huge, unstoppable villain, just pure force.
1:37.7	He is indestructible.
1:39.6	He has superhuman strength.
1:42.2	Probably like real comic book nerds would probably school me on the lore.
1:46.4	But he's like, I think, the strongest mutant.
1:50.6	And he just comes and nothing can stop him.
1:54.0	There is one scene where he throws a tank at Wolverine and he just says,
1:59.4	tank you very much.
	...

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