ROMAN MARS: Would the Heimlich Manoeuvre be something that people knew if it wasn't attached to a name like Heimlich? No, I don’t think so.

HZ: Would it have made the news in May of this year when 96-year-old Dr Henry Heimlich himself saved a woman from choking on a piece of hamburger meat by using the manoeuvre that bears his name?

RM: So I still like eponyms in these ways that they help tell an interesting story. But I totally get why and I'm not so tied to my world view or nostalgia that I cannot accept that it would be better another way.

HZ: Well, good, because there are certainly some aspects to eponyms that I don’t think you’d like, Roman.

JENNI RODD: So what we're trying to understand is the processes that are going on in your head right now as you try and understand what I'm saying.

HZ: Jenni Rodd is a cognitive psychologist at University College London, and I think she can look right through my skull to see those processes at work.

JR: If I could do that, that would make my job a whole heap easier. Unfortunately we can't look directly into your brain, so we have to come up with cunning and devious experiments that are the next best thing.

HZ: Experiments studying how people respond to language, written or spoken, sometimes while the subject undergoes an fMRI scan - functional magnetic resonance imaging - to show what the brain is up to.

JR: But what we want to understand is for each word that you hear, or possibly read, what it is that you're doing in your head to figure out what that individual word means, and then how you put those together to understand the meaning of sentences, paragraphs, conversations and so on.

"The fact is that none of the world's writing systems apart from codes are meant to be obscure. And this is crucial. Normal writing systems that we can't read just because we haven't deciphered them doesn't mean that they indecipherable; it means that we haven't done it."

There are many reasons why languages become extinct, but to pick an extreme example: a couple of thousand years hence, after the apocalypse, the only present-day language still being spoken then is, say, Portuguese. But there’s all this written material from the lost cultures that you, the post-apocalyptic survivor, want to decrypt. Technology is totally different by then - except optical magnification, which remains fundamentally similar to how it has been since humans began using it millennia before. In the ancient ruins of Fort Mason, San Francisco, you find a Rosetta Disk, successfully engineered to remain undamaged by fire and water and air and time. Around the edges of the disk, there’s writing large enough for you to read; but you see there are more small markings on it. You put the disk under a microscope. You see text you recognise in Portuguese - huh, that text next to it is similar in size and shape, you start spotting a word that appears with similar frequency as in the Portuguese, thus you deduce what that one means, and then another, you start seeing linguistic patterns and gain some insight into what characters and writing system are being used. And if you stick with the task long enough, you figure out that language.

This isn’t some futuristic dream. It has already happened. Most famously with the Rosetta Project’s namesake, the Rosetta Stone.

HZ: Where are you speaking to me from right now?
AMY: The geographic South Pole.

HZ: If it weren’t dark outside, Amy Lowitz could look out the window and see the actual South Pole marker.

AL: I’m here at the South Pole, working for the University of Chicago on the South Pole telescope as a winter telescope operator.
CHRISTINE: I’m Christine Moran ... I’m on one year leave to operate the South Pole telescope down here at the South Pole and Antarctica with Amy Lowitz.
HZ: And when did you last see daylight?
AL: [laugh]
CM: April,-ish? I think at least 3-4 months of total darkness, or close to it.

HZ: And a few weeks after the sunlight disappears for the last time before the totally dark months of Antarctic winter, something odd starts to occur. People start to forget - what was it? ...Words! And they drift off without finishing their...uh...

ALLISON: It happens! It happens.

HZ: ...Sentences!

HELEN ZALTZMAN: Welcome back to the EtymOlympics, where the meaning of sport is the sport.
MATTHEW CROSBY: And of course, sport itself, from the French ‘desporter’, used to mean an amusing and fun pastime.
HZ: That’s right, Matthew. Something to remember, football fans. Supposed to be fun.
MC: That meaning was 700 years ago though. A lot has changed in 700 years. Look how much easier it is nowadays to get a soy latte.
HZ: And there's a very excited crowd out there
MC: I can only describe the atmosphere as electric.
HZ: That's because sports commentators can only describe atmospheres as electric.
MC: It's the only adjective I ever learnt.