In May 2017, an item by Laura Bradley in Vanity Fair magazine explained the origins of the mock-Latin phrase that serves as the title of this episode: "Technically speaking, 'Nolite te bastardes carborundorum'-a phrase found in Margaret Atwood's novel The Handmaid's Tale and, more recently, its TV adaptation...means nothing. It's a made-up phrase in mock Latin-a schoolboy's joke, as it's explained in both the novel and the series. If it were a real phrase, it would roughly translate to 'don't let the bastards grind you down.'" Atwood told Time magazine that the phrase long predated the mid-1980s, when she was writing the source novel: "I'll tell you the weird thing about it: it was a joke in our Latin classes. So this thing from my childhood is permanently [tattooed] on people's bodies." In the Vanity Fair piece, Michael Fontaine, a Cornell University classics professor, said that the phrase "looks like someone tried to put the English into Google Translate for Latin. 'Nolite' means 'don't' (plural) in Latin, while 'te' means 'you.' 'Bastardes, however, is a made-up word with a Latin suffix, and 'carborundorum' is not Latin either." Fontaine goes on to speculate that because "carborundorum" was a turn-of-the-century (English) word for an abrasive industrial product, and since the word looks like it might be Latin, "my guess is that c. 1890-1900, some American people thought it would be funny to pretend like 'carborundum' was actually a Latin word meaning 'needing to be worn down' or (making allowances for ignorance, which is surely part of it) 'to wear down.'"