Dr. Johannes Hofer In 1688, young Swiss physician Johannes Hofer announced he’d identified a new disease.  He introduced this disease as mal du pays , but also referred to it as mal du Suisse and Schweizerheimweh .  The term mal du pays is still used in modern French, but it has come to mean homesickness .  What Hofer was trying to identify was something a little different, which was the earliest use of what we now call nostalgia . The word nostalgia was coined from two Greek words: νόστος (/nɔsˌ tos/ or NOS tos), meaning homecoming , borrowed directly from Homer’s Odyssey , and ἄλγος (/alˌ ɡos/ or AL gos), meaning ache .  The other two terms, mal du Suisse  and Schweizerheimweh applied to Dr. Hofer’s definition because they translate specifically as “sickness for Switzerland”.  The idea wasn’t that Switzerland made anyone sick, but rather, it was being away from Switzerland that was the root of the problem.  Hofer used this term to desc...

Spaghetti, as everyone knows, is Italian cuisine.  The word spaghetti itself is Italian for little strings.  Yet for an import, it’s pretty ubiquitous outside of Italy.  All over Europe and the Americas, spaghetti is one of the most popular dishes.  Many of us grew up with it, whether or not we have any Italian ancestry.  All the same, it still registers as a foreign dish.   With all the Italian immigrants to the United States, it’s hardly surprising that this simple yet versatile dish caught on here, but it still had to be new at one point.  Exactly when spaghetti stopped being an outsider food and started ranking as comfort food for Americans is hard to pin down.  It probably started around the time we stopped seeing Italians as outsiders who were threatening our way of life.  The Immigrant Exclusion Act of 1924, which effectively stopped (legal) Italian immigration to the United States, was just a symptom of a rising anti-f...