I read "The Epstein Inquisition" first. If the web address is any indication, the original title of this post was "It's not psychopathy"; Vox has coined a rather opaque new term for what a more adventurous wordsmith once dubbed the Hangman Rope Sneak Deadly Parroting Puppet Gangster Playboy Scum On Top:
They’re not psychopaths. They don’t have a disease of the soul. They are, rather, paradopaths, or individuals who have surrendered their spirits to forces of greater evil. At the lower levels, they seek wealth, women, power, and fame. At the higher levels, they seek to transform themselves into what the Bible describes as “unclean spirits”.
I wasted an unreasonable amount of time trying to figure out the etymo-logic behind this coinage. If the point is that they don't have a disease, why does he keep the -path ending that implies that they do? And what is parad- supposed to mean? Is it meant to be a modification of parodos or parody? A clipping of paradosis or paradise or paradox or paradigm or parade? None of those possibilities bears any clear relation to the meaning assigned. Is it just the prefix para-, with a random do- interposed for no particular reason? In the end, I conceded defeat, but not before racking my brain for every possible meaning for this mysterious parad- morpheme.
I read the paradopath post shortly after it was published. I didn't read "Peleg, for in his days the earth was divided" until just now. It includes this paragraph:
One interpretation is that this division is merely political, but that doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Genesis already describes ethnic and territorial separations using the verb parad (Gen 10:5). In Gen 10:25, however, the verb palag is used, a term associated with splitting or cleaving. The lexical shift suggests that something more structural than ordinary dispersion is in view.
I don't think this parad can be what Vox had in mind, either, but it's quite a coincidence.
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