Analysis
Smart, independent reporting on Turkey's politics, economy and foreign affairs.
In Turkish, zehirlenme or poisoning is one of those words that lands with a sting. Its genealogy stretches back through Ottoman Turkish to Persian zahr (poison), but the word has given birth to colorful idioms: zehir saçmak (to scatter venom), zehir zemberek sözler (barbed words that blister on impact), ağzı zehir gibi (a tongue sharp enough to wound).
In Turkish, casus is the spy who slips through keyholes and whispers down telephone lines. In Ottoman Turkish, the word appears as câsûs, borrowed from Arabic, and, under Sultan Abdülhamid II’s watchful reign, it had a cousin, hafiyye, the “secret investigator” who made surveillance an imperial art.
The word of the week is kedi, or cat, the agile, intuitive feline who is supposed to have nine lives. The Turkish word kedi ultimately goes back to Late Latin cattus (“cat”), with an intermediate form in Byzantine Greek gati (γ α τί, “kitten”) from which it passed into Ottoman Turkish as kedi. So why is it the word of the week? Because of the Istanbul Biennial, the must-see flagship event of the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (IKSV) that continues until the end of November.