Today’s word of the day is ancient Greek: kapnobatai, literally “smoke-treaders” or “those who walk on clouds.”
It comes to us as the nickname for an ancient people in Strabo’s Geography. The work Strabo cites is now lost, and scholars have advanced several theories to explain what the nickname referred to. One theory is that the people would enter trances walking in clouds of smoke.
It’s this theory that makes kapnobatai my word of the day, since it’s a word we need again, for modern engineers entranced by clouds of computers.