A WORD, PLEASE — magazine

continuity: Next, Professor Aubrey Vellum, with the secret shared by a glossy monthly and a soldier's rifle.

the verdict: You're in a waiting room, flipping through a magazine you'd never buy: a recipe, a film star, a quiz about your personality. Nothing in it belongs together, and somehow that's the fun of it.

a word, please: Magazine. A word, please.

the crack: Our story starts with Arab merchants and a word for the building where goods were kept safe: makhzan , a 'storehouse,' from a verb meaning 'to store up.' Picture a cool, dark depot stacked high with sacks and bales, waiting for the next ship. Traders carried the word across the Mediterranean. The Italians made it magazzino , the French made it magasin , and by the middle of the fourteen hundreds English had it too. For us, a magazine was simply a warehouse.

the collision: Then soldiers borrowed it. By the late fifteen hundreds a magazine meant the army's store for gunpowder and shot, which was the one building where you really didn't light a candle. Then, in seventeen thirty-one, a London printer named Edward Cave had a lovely idea. He gathered essays, poems and news into one monthly bundle and called it The Gentleman's Magazine: a storehouse made of paper, packed with a little of everything. People sometimes guess that reading magazines were named after the part of a rifle that holds the bullets. It's a tidy guess, and it's backwards. That meaning arrived in the eighteen hundreds, more than a century after Cave, and it grew out of the old gunpowder store. So the glossy thing in the waiting room and the rifle's bullet-holder are cousins. Both are still warehouses, just for very different cargo.

the glimmer: We can't help it, any of us: we gather things up and keep them somewhere safe. The storehouse is never the interesting part. What we choose to fill it with is.

the exit: That's the word. Next time you pick one up in a waiting room, have a good look round the warehouse.