Yesterday Isabel showed me one of her old text books from high school. It is tattered and torn and on the spine you can barely read "History". I flipped through the pages, feeling the smell and the old-fashioned layout, and suddenly something caught my eye. Left page, inner column, midway from the top, in all-caps bold type: "VISIGOTH EPIGONISM".

I immediately recognised the words. That wasn't my book, but surely enough I used the same edition when I did history at high school. I will never forget the topic on Visigoth epigonism; I was 16, a curious kid quite well read for his age, and when I first stumbled against those words that I could not recognise, they got engraved in some engram at the back of my head.

I knew who the Visigoth were. I had studied history before and I had a rough idea of what they looked like in the pictures of the books. And I had watched a movie about them too! But "epigonism"... I had no clue about that word. I remember reading through the passage in the history book and being completely unable to infer the meaning of the title from the meaning of the text.

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