From New York City, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language.

I'm John McWater and this week, well, you know, Halloween is coming and so I guess I'm supposed to do a

Halloween episode and so okay, I can play along. Why don't we do a zombie show? We'll have a

zombie theme. You know, that's actually an African word for the record. We want to sprinkle in some

etymologies. That's from Key Congo. That's an African language, a Bantu language of the Niger Congo

family spoken in Angola and some other countries and the word originally was Zumbi and it was

brought here by slaves actually. So technically, zombie is a black thing. Zombies are of course the

living dead, you know, the stuff that we keep by extension for no reason. Like I have 900 CDs and I'm not

getting rid of them. I have about 400 DVDs. I thought those were really it permanent. This streaming

thing I'm trying, I still have a road tractor. I am just now realizing I no longer need a cable box.

In any case, zombie things actually permeate language as well and you can look at it on various

levels and offer a lot of what we use as language and think of as communication is zombie material.

So that can be our Halloween theme. Hey everybody, it's Tim Heidecker. You know me, Tim and Eric

Bridesmaids and Fantastic Four. I'd like to personally invite you to listen to Office Hours Live

with me and my co-hosts DJ Doug Pound. Hello. And Vic Berger. Howdy. Every week we bring you

last fun games and lots of other surprises. It's live. We take your Zoom calls. We love having fun.

Excuse me. Vic said something. It's music. I like having fun. I like to laugh. I like to

meet people who can make me laugh. Please subscribe. No. The truth is I didn't start out

planning this episode thinking about Halloween. What really got me going was one of those things

where you learned something long past your childhood about something that you think you know

everything about. You know, I actually don't know every word in English or language or I don't

know the things that I should know about them because I just found out this week that

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