the.com/international
The word that makes a flight delay sound like diplomacy.
means Involving or occurring between two or more nations rather than within just one.
from Coined in the late 1700s by philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who stitched it together from the Latin inter ('between') and natio ('nation') because he felt existing terms like 'law of nations' were too vague for the relations he wanted to describe — he needed a word for things happening *between* nations, not just within them. It caught on fast and spread well beyond law, eventually covering everything from treaties to terminals.
- origin
- Coined by Jeremy Bentham in 1780, not diplomats
- airports love it
- Makes a snack bar feel like an embassy
- legal meaning
- Rules between nations, which nations mostly ignore
- irony
- Describes borders by pretending they barely matter