Epicurean.
1. a disciple or student of the Greek philosopherEpicurus.
2. a person devoted to sensual enjoyment, especiallythat derived from fine food and drink.
In 2026, epicurean describes clubs, diningexperiences, kitchenware. It implies luxury, refinement, a certain kind ofappetite. You've seen it in one of those contexts. If not, Google will happilysource you one of the 50,000 recipes on website Epicurious.
Epicurus was a Greek philosopher in the 4th century BC.
He believed the good life was modest. Friendship.Philosophical conversation. Freedom from anxiety. He lived simply, taught in agarden, charged nothing.
He also — through pure reasoning, no instruments, no experiments — identified the atom as the basic unit of matter. Not alone; Democritus got there first. But Epicurus championed it, built on it, taught it. Two and a half thousand years before physics caught up.
This was not a man of excess.
So how did such a man give his name to frivolous excesses — and ultimately to gluttony and immorality?
He taught that pleasure — or contentment, a translation that would serve equally well from the Greek — was the core of morality. And morality that encompassed modesty and a freedom from anxiety was the path to pleasure.
He called his philosophy the pursuit of pleasure. He advocated that his followers seek pleasure.
Seek pleasure.
Those that wanted an easier path than this kind of pleasure, or had vested interests in other philosophies, found the word did most of their work for them.
By Shakespeare's time 2000 years later, epicure was already established to mean glutton. Sensualist. A seeker of pleasure with loose morals or priorities.
Despite only a tiny fraction of Epicurus work surviving the dark ages (although Lucretius among others give us a full understanding of his philosophy); that misunderstanding didn’t just survive it had flourished.
It's not the words we use with the people who already understand us that matter. Our choice of words is for the people we want to bring along with us — the people for whom it would be easier to hear what they want to hear than what we need them to understand.
