In our less communal age of central heating and separate rooms for each family member, we do not lend the hearth quite the importance that our ancestors did, Greek or otherwise. Yet, even for us, the word stands for something more than just a fireplace. We speak of “hearth and home.” Our word “hearth” shares its ancestry with “heart,” just as the modern Greek for “hearth” is kardia, which also means “heart.” In ancient Greece the wider concept of hearth and home was expressed by the oikos, which lives on for us today in words like “economics” and “ecology.” The Latin for hearth is focus—which
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