The word maelstrom traces back to the Moskstraumen, a system of tidal eddies and whirlpools between two of Norway’s Lofoten Islands, where twice a day strong currents and tides force huge volumes of water through a narrow, shallow strait and have swallowed fishing boats for centuries. Edgar Allan Poe’s 1841 story A Descent into the Maelstrom, about an old man who survived being sucked into the vortex, turned the place into a metaphor for existential dread. Theme parks then bottled it: Epcot’s Maelstrom was a log flume dark ride with trolls and storms, Morey’s Piers in New Jersey built a spinning flat ride, and Drayton Manor in the UK used a gyro swing that simulates the pull of a whirlpool through the inner ear with no water at all.

Writers and musicians borrowed it next, from Peter Watts’s 2001 novel to the Belgian band Oathbreaker, Kataklysm’s track Maelstrom 2010, and a 1980s Boston thrash band, while composers Julian Cochran and Robert W. Smith used orchestral writing to capture the ordered spiral of a vortex. Villains took the name too, including characters in Marvel Comics and Ice Age, Professor Maelstrom in Netflix’s Carmen Sandiego, and the target Wazir Kale in Hitman 2, giving indifferent natural chaos a human face that can be beaten. In games the meaning kept drifting: a literal whirlpool in Warcraft, a cybernetic gang in Cyberpunk 2077, and finally a lightning hammer in Dota 2, a textbook case of semantic drift.

• Poe anglicized Moskstraumen into maelstrom and made it a global word.
• A gyro swing spins its gondola while swinging, creating centripetal force that disorients riders.
• Crust punk and thrash use auditory masking, a dense wall of distortion that leaves listeners nowhere to orient.
• Apple Macintosh and PC games were titled Maelstrom in 1992 and 2007.
• The episode compares the word’s drift to the floppy disk save icon, which outlived the object it depicts.