{"id":18727,"date":"2026-06-01T12:17:52","date_gmt":"2026-06-01T19:17:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/?p=18727"},"modified":"2026-05-17T00:24:15","modified_gmt":"2026-05-17T07:24:15","slug":"laser","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/2026\/06\/01\/laser\/","title":{"rendered":"laser"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>I recently saw the word <i>laser<\/i> in a premodern context where it clearly wasn\u2019t referring to <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Laser\">Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation<\/a>. Which confused me.<\/p>\r\n<p>Turns out that <i>laser<\/i> is also a name for a plant called <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Silphium\">silphium<\/a>, and for the resin of that plant.<\/p>\r\n<p>Silphium is itself a little mysterious: \u201cIt was an essential item of trade from the ancient North African city of Cyrene, and was so critical to the Cyrenian economy that most of their coins bore an image of the plant. [But the] exact identity of silphium is unclear.\u201d<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18727","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-to-me-words"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18727","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18727"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18727\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18728,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18727\/revisions\/18728"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18727"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18727"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18727"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}