My Factory of Extravagant Marvels

This post first appeared on the blog for the Centre for Privacy Studies: https://privacy.hypotheses.org/1402     Why do we talk about privacy using the word "privacy"? English is the lingua franca of academic knowledge. We use it as a tool to communicate with each other across linguistic borders. So one of the answers to this question is that we use the word "privacy" as a way to explain to each other---in an international context---not only historical events described in English that use this English word, but also events that use other vocabulary and other languages, and that we (as researchers) recognize as being related to what in English we call privacy. But listening to the History of English Podcast , I recently caught myself pondering a second way of thinking about this question: why this particular word? Or to put it in another way, how and when did the word "privacy" (and related words, like "private") appear in the English lexicon? A