This episode reads a single Wikipedia disambiguation page, the one for the word mazagran, as a fossil record of how a word travels. The trail starts in Algeria, where Mazagran is a town in Mostaganem province and the site of the Battle of Mazagran in 1840. From there the name crossed the Mediterranean: it was given to a village in France and to the Rue de Mazagran in Paris’s 10th arrondissement. The hosts read that as spatial memory, a way of domesticating a distant colonial conflict by putting it on the street signs and return addresses of people who would never see North Africa.

The word then moved from maps into the kitchen. Under the page’s Other uses heading, mazagran names a type of tall Algerian drinkware used for coffee, and also a drink of coffee mixed with lemon juice. The hosts explain the overlap through metonymy, the same process that lets casserole and tagine name both a vessel and the food cooked in it, and suggest the cups and recipe traveled with soldiers and travelers. They close on the page’s own disclaimer about incorrect internal links as an admission that history refuses to stay in tidy categories.

• The disambiguation page sorts every meaning into just two headings, Places and Other uses.
• Naming a Paris street after a North African battle is presented as top-down imperial statecraft.
• Citrus in coffee is framed as practical where dairy spoiled fast or water needed masking.
• The cup and the lemon coffee are described as bottom-up preservation, carried in daily habit rather than decreed.
• A military historian and a barista hunting vintage recipes would land on the same page for completely different reasons.