Category Archives: Words

Words

Xenophobia

2 Comments

zɛnəˈfəʊbɪə

xenophobia: a deep antipathy to foreigners

ForeignersRecent political events in the the USA, Europe and elsewhere have meant that this word keeps popping into my head. It comes from two Greek words: xenos, “stranger”, and phobos “fear”.

In Greek myth, Phobos was the god of terror; a son of Mars, the god of war. His name is now attached to one of the moons of the planet Mars (the other moon is named for his brother, Deimos, “dread”).

Phobos gave his name to the suffix -phobia, meaning “fear of”, and to the word phobia, which can be variously used to designate extreme, incapacitating fears, deep antipathies or even just relatively mild aversions. if you have a phobia, you are phobic. There are a lot of phobias—I once compiled a list of named phobias, which stretches to almost three hundred, and certainly isn’t exhaustive. The rarer ones often have multiple names, apparently having been coined several times over in ignorance of existing terms—a fear of mirrors has been variously called eisoptrophobia, catoptrophobia and spectrophobia, for instance.

The commoner ones are well-known: claustrophobia, a fear of confined spaces, comes from Latin claustrum, “cloister”; agoraphobia, fear of open spaces, from Latin agora, “market-place”; acrophobia, fear of heights, from Greek akros “summit”. Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film Vertigo should really have been called Acrophobia, but I understand why he went for a word that just means “dizziness” instead. (Mind you, the 1990 film Arachnophobia, “fear of spiders”, did all right at the box-office.) Of the common animal fears, fear of snakes is ophidiophobia; of mice, musophobia; of cats, ailurophobia. Many children (at least, those whose fathers are unbearded) suffer from a touch of pogonophobia, a fear of beards and bearded men. A fear of dentists has been called odontophobia, but on strict etymological terms that would mean a fear of teeth, and the alternative phrase, “dental phobia”, is no better. And coulrophobia, a fear of clowns, has become something of a cultural meme, spawning novels (like Stephen King‘s It), endless movies (collected in a handy list at IMDb) and “clown panics”, like the one that recently affected France.

Coulrophobia takes us well into the territory of concocted words that see more use outside the medical profession than within it. Its origins and etymology aren’t at all clear—claims that it derives from Ancient Greek kolobathristes, “stilt-walker”, or Modern Greek klooun, “clown”, don’t really seem to fit the spelling of the word. Other -phobia words with dubious origins but better etymology include: arachibutyrophobia, a fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of the mouth; retrogenuflexophobia, a fear of the knees bending backwards; siderodromophobia, a fear of train travel; bathysiderodromophobia, a fear of subway trains; novercaphobia, fear of one’s step-mother. I apologize unreservedly to anyone who suffers an incapacitating phobic response in any of these circumstances, but they do have the feel of words that have been invented because we could invent them, rather than because we particularly needed them.

Finally, on this topic, it’s particular important to distinguish between pantophobia, “a fear of everything”, and pantaphobia, “a complete absence of fear”. Both derive from the Greek prefix panto-, meaning “all”, but the a- prefix in the second word indicates “an absence of”—aphobia, “no fear”.

The Latin word for “fear” is timor—as in the words from the old prayer, timor mortis conturbat me, “the fear of death disturbs me”, which was used repeatedly in William Dunbar‘s deeply depressing poem, Lament for the Makars. Timor gives us timorous and timid.

Going back to the first part of xenophobia, the prefix xeno- has been extensively used to indicate various things either foreign or strange: xenophilia is a love of foreigners or foreign things, while xenomania is the same thing, taken to extremes. The Xenopus toad that lingered forlornly in a tank in the corner of my biology classroom at school is a “strange foot”, because (unusually for a toad) it has claws on its rear feet. A xenotransplant or xenograft is a tissue transplanted from one species to another, like a pig heart-valve implanted in a human. Xenolalia is an ability to speak foreign languages, and xenodochy is hospitality to strangers.

The Latin equivalent of xenos was alienus, “pertaining to another person or place”. Most obviously, that gives us our words alien and alienate. Alienigenate means “foreign-born”, and alieniloquy is not, as you might expect, talking to foreigners, but means “wandering off the topic of conversation”. Alienation most commonly means a sense of estrangement, but in the past it could imply a complete removal, as in the phrase alienation of affections. So mental alienation was a loss of mental faculties, and alienists were doctors who looked after those who suffered from mental alienation—the nineteenth-century “mad-doctors” who evolved slowly into modern psychiatrists.

Get An Email Subscription To The Oikofuge

or

Subscribe To Only The 'Words' Posts
(Be the first)
Words

Grampian

4 Comments

ˈɡræmpɪən

Calgacus
(Source)

If the enemy be rich, they are rapacious; if he be poor, they lust for dominion; neither the east nor the west has been able to satisfy them. Alone among men they covet with equal eagerness poverty and riches. To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they make a solitude and call it peace.

According to the Roman historian Tacitus, these words are how the Pictish leader Calgacus described the Roman Empire to his men on the eve of the Battle of Mons Graupius, in AD 83. In the battle itself, the Picts were defeated, though the Romans didn’t gain much advantage and never really consolidated their gains in Pictish territory.

Apart from the fact that it was in northern Scotland, no-one is quite sure of the location of Mons Graupius. The Latin word mons implies a hill, or at the very least a huge rock formation. But graupius seems to be a foreign place-name cast into Latin form. There’s an argument that it comes from a Celtic word related to Welsh crib, which can mean “comb” or “mountain ridge”. An original Latinized cripius would then evolve through copying errors—cripius, crapius, craupius, graupius.

Kempstone Hill and Bennachie in Aberdeenshire have both been suggested as plausible sites for Mons Graupius, with both located near Roman camps and corresponding to some extent to Tacitus’ description of the battlefield. But other suggestions have ranged from Fife in the south to Sutherland in the north.

The next copying error to befall Mons Graupius was in 1476, when a printed edition of Tacitus’ history of the Roman campaign in Scotland, De Vita Et Moribus Lulii Agricolae, was set with an “m” replacing the “u”—Mons Grampius. In 1520 the Scottish historian Hector Boece (pronounce it “Boyce”) took this misprint and translated it into the Grampian Mountains—a name he applied to a region of hill country in roughly the most likely vicinity of the Battle of Mons Graupius—the southeast corner of the Scottish Highlands.

Boece’s motives are a little unclear—he was born in Dundee and spent his later life in Aberdeen, so must have known that no-one in the area ever called these hills “the Grampians”. The local name (which is still in use) was The Mounth, from Gaelic Am Monadh, “the mountains”. Maybe he just wanted something a little more specific.

Perhaps because it had no local anchor in common usage, the word Grampians soon came unstuck from the Mounth hills and started to spread around the country.

When I was at school, I learned Boece’s definition—a region of mountains south of the River Dee and west of Glen Shee. But the Grampians have also been interpreted as extending farther west—at least as far as the Drumochter pass and the line of the A9 road, and on occasion to include all the hills of the Loch Lomond & The Trossachs National Park. This last definition is one favoured by the Encyclopædia Britannica—“the wall-like southern edge” of the Highlands “that overlooks the Lowlands”.

The northern boundary of the Grampians is likewise expansile. From the Dee it has crept north to the Spey, annexing the Cairngorm Mountains, and even as far as the Great Glen, turning a huge area of Highland Scotland into “the Grampians”.

And that’s where the Grampian expansion seems to have stopped. In a check of the paper references available chez Oikofuge, the most common current usage is to designate the central of the three upland areas of Scotland, with the Northern Highlands north of the Great Glen, the Grampians between the Great Glen and the Central Lowlands, and the Southern Uplands south of the Central Lowlands.

I’ve summarized the various incarnations of the Grampians below, with Boece’s original conception in purple, the current common usage in red, and the various other usages I’ve encountered roughly sketched between:

Various definitions of the Grampian Mountains
Based on an original used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported licence

Boece’s coinage has gone on to lend its name to other things: the Grampian Region, a political entity that occupied northeast Scotland between 1975 and 1996; Grampian Television, an independent television station that covers northern Scotland (now known as STV North); mountain ranges in Australia and New Zealand; the Grampian Hillwalking Club, originally formed by employees of the Grampian Regional Council; and a whole host of other organizations that have some claim to association with northeast Scotland.

That’s not bad going for a misspelled and misapplied version of a name of uncertain etymology attached to an unknown location.

Get An Email Subscription To The Oikofuge

or

Subscribe To Only The 'Words' Posts
Words

Système International Prefixes: Part 3

Leave a comment

In my first two posts about the SI unit prefixes, I described how the system originated in the French Republican metric system of 1795. Part 1 dealt with those original fractional prefixes—deci-, centi- and milli-, designating a tenth, hundredth and thousandth part of the base unit. Part 2 dealt with the multipliers—deca-, hecto-, kilo- and myria-, for tenfold, hundredfold, thousandfold and ten-thousandfold multiplication.

Inspired though the original system was, it didn’t offer enough range for scientific use, and the collection of prefixes has been steadily growing. There was also a realization that there didn’t need to be a prefix for every power of ten—that would get unwieldy very quickly. In the last century we’ve added prefixes only for integer powers of one thousand.

The next two prefixes were introduced as part of the definition of the electrical units of measurement, by a committee set up in 1861 by the British Association for the Advancement of Science, under the leadership of Lord Kelvin and James Clerk Maxwell. The new prefixes were mega-, for a millionfold multiplication, and micro-, for a millionth part of the base unit. This created an abbreviation crisis—there were now three prefixes beginning with “m”. Mega- was distinguished from milli- by the use of its capital initial (“M”) establishing a precedent for all the multiplier prefixes above kilo-. But for micro-, the Greek lower case letter mu (μ) had to be recruited. In future, care would be taken to avoid producing more than two prefixes with the same initial letter.

Both mega- and micro- are Greek, which upsets the original system of using Latin for fractions and Greek for multiples. Mega- comes from megas, “big”, and micro- from micros, “small”. And both prefixes had already been doing duty in the scientific vocabulary to designate big things and small things. The word microscope, for a device to look at small things, had been around since the seventeenth century; the less well-known megascope was a nineteenth-century projecting microscope—it threw an enlarged image on to a screen, where it could be traced and turned into a drawing. There are so many words in micro- and mega- that even I am not tempted to try to list them. Megas also gave us the medical suffix -megaly, meaning “enlargement”—acromegaly, enlargement of the extremities (the hands and feet); hepatomegaly, a swollen liver. And maybe it’s worth mentioning that microwaves are just “small waves”—their wavelength is short in comparison to radio waves, but still measurable in centimetres or millimetres, not micrometres.

After the adoption of mega- and micro-, the idea grew that we need a new prefix at each new integer power of one thousand—thousandfold, millionfold, billionfold, and so on up; thousandth, millionth, billionth and so on down. In powers of ten that goes 103, 106, 109 …, and 10-3, 10-6, 10-9 … I’m going to need to use that notation from here on in. The smaller fractions and multipliers were still useful enough to be kept in regular use, but myria- languished and died before the nineteenth century was over.

The next additions came in 1947, from the Union Internationale de Chimie. (I suppose they took a particular interest in the matter because chemistry deals fairly regularly with very large numbers of very small things.) At their fourteenth conference they adopted the following prefixes: giga- for 109 and tera- for 1012; nano- for 10-9 and pico- for 10-12. Along with mega- and micro-, this set a useful precedent for multiplier prefixes to end in “a”, while fraction prefixes end in “o”.

These new prefixes are all Greek but one. The odd one out is pico-, which is Spanish. Pico is the Spanish word for a mountain, and for a bird’s beak. But it’s also used to mean “a little”. So dos metros y pico is “a little over two metres”. (In the case of the picometre, a very little over two metres.) Pico- seems to have been in general use for some time before 1947—the Oxford English Dictionary has an example of its use from William Eccles‘s Wireless Telegraphy and Telephony from 1915, whereas all the others have their first citation from the Proceedings of the 1947 Union Internationale de Chimie conference.

Nano- comes from nanos, “dwarf”. Nanism is a state of dwarfishness, a term applied to the evolutionary change in the size of species at high latitudes or on remote islands. And nanization is the English word for the process of producing a bonsai tree—the deliberate production of a dwarf plant.

Giga- comes from gigas, “giant”, which spawned a whole collection of synonymous adjectives in English.  At one time or another we’ve had gigantal, gigantean, gigantesque, gigantical, gigantine and gigantive, but only gigantic survives in common usage. Giga- was intended to be pronounced ʤaɪɡə, with the same first syllable as gigantic. Back in the 1970s I had a physics lecturer who actually pronounced it that way—and we all thought he was wrong, because (unaware of the relationship to gigantic things) we had grown up pronouncing it ɡɪɡə, with the same first syllable as giggle. And that non-etymological pronunciation is now utterly dominant.

Tera- is from teras, “monster”. Teratogenesis is any process, such as drug toxicity in pregnant women, that causes birth deformities—a word coined in a less sympathetic age than our own, for sure.

In 1960, the prefixes pico-, nano-, micro-, mega-, giga- and tera- were all adopted into the newborn Système International, at the 11th General Conference of the Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures. From here on in, any new prefixes needed to be approved by the CGPM.

And at their next meeting, in 1964, they approved femto- (for 10-15) and atto- (for 10-18). Perhaps they were running out of classical words that didn’t conflict with existing abbreviations—these two are Danish. Femto- is from femten, “fifteen”, and atto- from atten, “eighteen”, the two powers of ten represented, and two initial letters that hadn’t been used before. I wonder if Danish was the chosen language as a nod to the strongly Danish foundations of quantum mechanics, which deals with the extremely small and the extremely fast; but I can’t find any confirmation of that idea.

This was the point at which some sort of mnemonic was becoming necessary. At school I learned, “To Give Me Kicks My Musicians Now Play For Ages”—for tera-, giga-, mega-, kilo-, milli-, micro-, nano-, pico-, femto-, atto-.

But in 1975 the 15th General Conference messed that one up, while restoring symmetry to the prefix range. The approved peta- (for 1015) and exa- (for 1018). We’re back to Greek again, but with new rules. Peta- is from pente, “five”, and exa- is from hex, “six”. Peta- could be distinguished from pico- by using a capital letter in its abbreviation, and exa- was a new initial letter, so that’s all good … but what’s the “five” and “six” about? These are powers of a thousand. 1015 = 10005 and 1018 = 10006. There’s also seems to have been a bit of word-play going on, as if pretending to continue a series in which tera- was derived from Greek tetras, “four”.

O-kay. We can still deal with this. “Ever Polite, To Give Me Kicks My Musicians Now Play For Ages.”

Well, that lasted until 1991, and the 19th General Conference, which approved zetta- (for 1021) and yotta- (for 1024), zepto- (for 10-21) and yocto- (for 10-24).

I know what you’re thinking: Really? Aren’t these some of the less famous Marx Brothers? But they’re actually a continuation of the pattern established by peta- and exa-. Zetta- and zepto- come from Latin septem, “seven”, while yotta- and yocto– are derived from octo, which means “eight” in both Latin and Greek. So the reference is to powers of a thousand again, with these prefixes designating seventh and eighth powers. The custom of ending multipliers in “a” and fractions in “o” continues, as does the sporadic use of paired consonant sounds in the fractions but never in the multipliers—so we have “ct” and “pt” in yocto- and zepto- echoing the “cr” and “mt” in micro- and femto-. As for the odd initial letters, I think they reflect the increasing difficulty of finding abbreviations that aren’t already in use in the SI’s crowded alphabet soup.

And that’s all we’ve got, so far. The Andromeda Galaxy is 24 zettametres away, the Earth has a mass of 5972 yottagrams, and … well, a picture is worth 1.66 zeptomoles of words.

SI Prefixes table
Table reproduced from the Astronomy Education at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Web Site

Note: The SI prefixes were expanded in range in 2022, after this post was published. See my update here.

Get An Email Subscription To The Oikofuge

or

Subscribe To Only The 'Words' Posts
Words

Système International Prefixes: Part 2

Leave a comment

In my previous post about the Système International prefix system, I described how they originated in the French Republican metric system of 1795, which introduced a set of prefixes to designate multiples and fractions of its base units.

For instance, the metre was subdivided using prefixes into decimetres, centimetres and millimetres, designating a tenth, hundredth and thousandth part of a metre, respectively. Multiples of the metre were the decametre, hectometre, kilometre and myriametre, indicating tenfold, hundredfold, thousandfold and ten-thousandfold multiples, respectively.

In Part 1, I dealt with the fractional prefixes, all of which are Latin, and all of which are still with us to a greater or lesser extent. This time, I’m going to talk about the prefixes used for multiples, which are all Greek.

Deca- comes from Greek deka, “ten”. It gives us decade, a period of ten years; decad, a group of ten things; and decurion, a Roman soldier, subordinate to a centurion, who was in command of only ten men. A decapod has ten feet—shrimps and lobsters belong to the order Decapoda. And Giovanni Boccaccio‘s story collection The Decameron describes events that take place over ten days—from deka combined with Greek hemera, “day”.

The Decalogue refers to the Ten Commandments of the Old Testament. In the nineteenth century Arthur Hugh Clough offered a satirical reworking, The Latest Decalogue:

Thou shalt have one God only; who
Would be at the expense of two?

No graven images may be
Worshipped, except the currency.
…

Many doctors nowadays quote his version of the Sixth Commandment, “Thou shalt not kill; but need’st not strive / Officiously to keep alive,” as if it were a medical maxim, apparently unaware that Clough was writing satire.

Hecto- is from Greek hekaton, “hundred”. It appears in the name of the hectograph, a Victorian precursor of the photocopier. Hekaton gave us hecatomb, in Greek and Roman times a huge public sacrifice of a hundred oxen, and nowadays a mass killing. A hecatontad is a group of a hundred things. A hecatomped (yes, that’s the correct spelling) is not a hundred-footed thing (that job being already taken by the word centipede), but something a hundred feet square—it’s an architectural term, applied to Greek temples; as is hecatonstylon, a building having a hundred pillars.

Hecto- hasn’t had much luck as a prefix, and has tended to fall into disuse. It mainly lingers on in the hectare, a non-SI unit of area, equal to 10,000 square metres. (The are was the unit of area measurement in the original French Republican metric system, equal to one hundred square metres.)

Kilo- is an odd one. It comes from the Greek chilias, “thousand”—but why the French, who are no great users of the letter “k”, should have adopted that particular spelling is a bit of a mystery. (To me, at least.)

A chiliad is a group of a thousand things. A chiliander is something containing a thousand men—an overblown description of a warship. And chiliasm is a Greek synonym for a Latin term I mentioned in Part 1, millenarianism—the belief that Christ will return to Earth to rule for a thousand years. A chiliast is one who subscribes to chiliasm—a millenarian, in other words.

And, astonishingly, the Greeks found a use for the word chiliomb—an analogue of the hecatomb, except involving the sacrifice of a thousand animals. You certainly wouldn’t want to be in charge of clearing up after one of those.

Myria- comes from Greek myrias, “ten thousand”. A myriander was an even more unlikely warship that a chiliander—containing ten thousand men. A myriad was originally a group of ten thousand things, but the difficulty of actually counting that many of anything has led to a drift in meaning towards “uncountably many”. So a myriapod has uncountably many legs—it’s a catch-all term for the group of arthropods that includes the centipedes and millipedes.

Myria- has fared very badly as a multiplicative prefix, and has gone down into extinction. H.G. Wells made an effort to give myriad a new quantitative meaning in his 1910 novel, The Sleeper Awakes. In that story a man sleeps for two centuries, and awakens to discover that the decimal system of numbers has been abandoned in favour of a duodecimal system (based on the number 12):

“Yes. Six dozen, Sire. Of course things, even these little things, have altered. You lived in the days of the decimal system, the Arab system—tens, and little hundreds and thousands. We have eleven numerals now. We have single figures for both ten and eleven, two figures for a dozen, and a dozen dozen makes a gross, a great hundred, you know, a dozen gross a dozand, and a dozand dozand a myriad. Very simple?”

 H.G. Wells The Sleeper Awakes (1910)

By my reckoning, Wells’s myriad was equal to 2,985,984. We’ll need to wait for the rise of the duodecimal system before that catches on.

Cover of Smoot's EarThat about wraps it up for the French Republican metric prefixes. They were already inadequate to describe the world when they were introduced—it was known, for instance, that the Earth was four thousand myriametres in circumference, which was already understood to be a very small distance in comparison to the scale of the solar system. And microscopists were routinely examining objects on a scale of a thousandth of a millimetre.

More prefixes were needed, to expand the scale both upwards and downwards. That’s what I’m going to write about in Part 3. In the meantime, if you want to know more about the French invention of the metric system, I can recommend Robert Tavernor’s Smoot’s Ear: The Measure of Humanity.

Get An Email Subscription To The Oikofuge

or

Subscribe To Only The 'Words' Posts
(Be the first)
Words

Système International Prefixes: Part 1

4 Comments

The Système International d’unités, commonly known in English as the SI units, is a version of the metric system that, in addition to a carefully specified set of measurement units, contains a list of defined prefixes to specify multiples and fractions of its basic units. This set of prefixes has grown eccentrically over the years.

Title page of Instruction sur Les Mesures
The metric system arrives, 1795

The origin of the SI system is with the Republican metric system of France, which was passed into law on April 7, 1795. It was called metric because it was based around an entirely new unit of length measurement, the metre (in American English, the meter), which derived its name from the Greek metron,  “measure”. The metre was originally defined as being 1/40,000,000th part of the circumference of the Earth. (If you speak French, you’ll see that “deduced from the size of the Earth” was prominently displayed on the title page of the original description of this new metric system, which I’ve reproduced above.)

The metre was subdivided using prefixes into decimetres, centimetres and millimetres, designating a tenth, hundredth and thousandth part of a metre, respectively. Multiples of the metre were the decametre, hectometre, kilometre and myriametre, indicating tenfold, hundredfold, thousandfold and ten-thousandfold multiples, respectively. This approach was adopted only after considerable discussion—there was a body of opinion that the prefixes would cause confusion, and that it would be better to adopt a completely different name for each order of magnitude. But the prefix system was simply too flexible to be discarded—once in place, it could be applied intuitively to any and all units of measurement.

The classical prefixes seem to have been chosen with some care—all the fractions are Latin, all the multiples are Greek. It’s a pleasing approach, but (as I’ll describe later) it didn’t last.

Deci- comes from Latin decimus, “tenth”, the origin of our word decimal, “pertaining to tenths”; and also decimate—originally, to kill every tenth person of a group, a punishment used by the Roman army. It has since taken on a more extreme meaning, implying that the group has been nearly wiped out. Decimus is also the origin of the word dime, originally meaning a tenth part of something, and now attached to the American coin valued at a tenth of a dollar.

Centi- is from Latin centum, “hundred”, which gives us the name of another coin— the cent. A lot of currencies use cents, and usually they are equivalent to a hundredth of some larger denomination. Per cent means “in every hundred”, but its origin is slightly obscure. It may come from Italian per cento or French pour cent, both meaning “for a hundred”; what it doesn’t come from is per centum, which is only pseudo-Latin. To centuple is to multiply a hundredfold. A century is a hundred years or (about) a hundred roman soldiers, the latter being commanded by a centurion. And, speaking of the Roman army again, centesimation was milder than decimation—only one in a hundred was punished or killed. There may also have been an intermediate level, vigesimation, involving the punishment of one in twenty, but it seems to be poorly attested.

If you live a hundred years you are a centenarian, and you celebrate a centenary. If something is divided into a hundred units, it is centigrade, like the temperature scale. If it has a hundred feet (or just looks like it might possibly have a hundred feet) it is a centipede. And if it has a hundred eyes it is centoculated—a word that seems only ever to have been used with reference to the mythical and ever-watchful giant, Argus Panoptes.

Milli- is from Latin mille, “thousand”, which gives us millennium, a thousand years. According to some interpretations of the Book of Revelation, the Millennium is a thousand-year period in which Jesus Christ will return to reign on Earth. A millenarian subscribes to that belief, which is called millenarianism. It has been suggested that there was an outbreak of millenarianism at the approach of the year AD 1000, with many people anticipating that the Millennium would begin after the end of the first millennium of the Christian calendar—but the evidence of that seems to be patchy and debatable. It did, however, lead to a shift in association for the word millenarian—there were various sorts of panic and anxiety associated with the arrival of the year 2000, and they were all referred to as being millenarian, whether or not they had any Christian underpinning.

Something with a thousand feet (or that just looks like it might have a thousand feet) is a millipede. If it is very spotty, maybe even having a thousand spots, it is millipunctate. A milleme is another coin—it was a thousandth part of the old Egyptian pound. To millecuplate is to multiply a thousandfold, but it’s an awkward and ugly word, which has deservedly fallen into disuse. Mille-feuille is a multilayered pastry—its French name means “a thousand leaves”. A millesm is a thousandth part, a mille-millesm is a millionth part, and millimillenary denotes accuracy to one part in a million.

A milliard is a thousand million—or at least it used to be, back in the days when the British used the word billion to denote a million million. But French mathematicians started using the word billion for a thousand million, the Americans followed suit, and the old British usage has been steadily driven towards extinction, taking the word milliard with it.

So much for the Latin fractional prefixes. In my next post about words, I’ll write about the Greek multiplicative prefixes. And in the one after that, I’ll write about how the system expanded in later years.

To close here, I’ll offer one example of the flexibility of the prefix system when applied to new units of measurement. I’ve previously discussed the science fiction and fantasy writer Poul Anderson. In his novel Fire Time (1974) he introduced a standard measure of female beauty—the millihelen, defined as enough beauty to launch a single ship.

Note: In annoying sychronicity, a letter-writer to the current edition (23 April 2016) of New Scientist has just told the story of the millihelen, albeit without giving Anderson due credit.
Update (May 14, 2016): Oh-ho. Turns out Anderson didn’t originate the joke. New Scientist have now unearthed a discussion of the millihelen on their own letters page, dating back almost fifty years: 27 November 1958, p.1400.

Get An Email Subscription To The Oikofuge

or

Subscribe To Only The 'Words' Posts
Words

Logomachy

2 Comments

ləˈɡɒməkɪ

Logomachy: An argument about words

Inigo Montoya: You keep using that word.* I do not think it means what you think it means.

William Goldman, The Princess Bride

Once people start to argue about the words they’ve been using in their argument, they’re having a logomachy. Nothing much useful happens after that, unless they’re philosophers. And I suppose that depends on what you feel about the usefulness of philosophy.

Logomachy comes from two Greek words. The first is logos, which had a primary meaning of “word” or “speech”, but was also used to signify “proportion”, “value”, “computation” and “argument”, among many other shades and facets of meaning. The second is machia, “fighting”.

Logos, of course, gives us all those words ending in -logy.  These have mainly two senses—there’s a group that has something to do with argument, and a group that has something to do with speech. The former is made up of all those -ologies like theology, geology and zoology, where the suffix indicates “the study of”. Exceptions to the -ology are petralogy (study of rocks), mineralogy (study of minerals) and genealogy (the study of family ancestry). I’m not going to talk any more about those, except to write genealogy again. Genealogy. GeneAlogy.

The other group is more interesting. As well as familiar words like eulogy (“good words”) and tautology (“same words”) it also offers us matæology (foolish conversation), psilology (empty talk), cacology (poor pronunciation) and polylogy (wordiness).

An apology was originally a verbal defence—only later did it develop its present association with contrition. The original sense of conducting a defence is still present in apologist (a person who defends or justifies the actions of another) and apologetics (a branch of theology that seeks to produce logical justification for Christianity). And analogy comes from the sense of logos involving proportions—originally a mathematical term for “equal proportions”, it developed into its current usage by, well, analogy.

When logos reaches English through French, it gives us the suffix -logue, which American English curtails to -log. So we have prologue, epilogue, dialogue and monologue. Analogue shares duties with analogy, and has the same derivation. (But catalogue comes from Greek legien, to choose.)

Logic takes us back to the “argument” sense of logos—a tool to help us put forward a good argument.

A logodædalist is cunning with words, logorrhœa is excessive speech,  a logolept is a word enthusiast, and logolatry is an unreasonable regard for words. (Stop looking at me like that.)

Latin loqui, “to speak”, is an obvious cousin to Greek logos, and it gives us a good crop of wordy words in English. A soliloquy involves talking to yourself; a colloquy involves talking to someone else; an alloquy involves addressing a group. So colloquial speech is what you use in conversation, but alloquial speech is the more formal language you might use when making a public address. Dulciloquy is soft speech; ambiloquy is ambivalent or ambiguous speech; blandiloquy is flattering speech; obloquy is slanderous speech; and stultiloquy is foolish speech.

A ventriloquist is literally a “belly speaker”; a dentiloquist speaks through his teeth, and a somniloquist speaks in her sleep.

If you speak much, you are loquacious. If you speak well, you are eloquent. If you speak too much, you are pleniloquent; if you say very little, you are pauciloquent; and if you speak quickly and volubly, you are tolutiloquent. If you’re a straight-talker, you’re planiloquent; a smooth talker, suaviloquent; a truth speaker, veriloquent; a plausible liar, mendaciloquent.

And if you can work a few of those words into conversation, you are grandiloquent—given to a lofty or imposing style of speech.

People love fighting almost as much as they do talking, so it’s no surprise that we have a host of -machy words, some more useful than others.

We have two words for single combat or duelling—the paradoxical pairing of monomachy and duomachy: the first emphasizes that each person fights alone, while the second notes that it takes two to make a fight. Monomachy has a long pedigree going back to the Greeks themselves; duomachy seems to be a one-off usage by Richard Francis Burton, and a hybrid of Latin and Greek roots, to boot—no good will come of it. Trimachy is understandably described as “rare” by the Oxford English Dictionary—it’s a series of three battles.

A naumachy is a naval battle; a hippomachy a fight on horseback; a symmachy is a wartime alliance; and I’ve previously mentioned skiamachy, which is shadow-boxing, or fighting with shadows. A thelymachy is a war amongst women, a poetomachy is a war between poets; and a gigantomachy is an apocalyptic battle, like the mythical one fought between the Greek gods and Titans.

Pygmachy looks like it should be the opposite of gigantomachy, but it’s actually a fist-fight, or the sport of boxing—from pygme, “fist”. (The connection to pygmy is that Greek pygme was also the name of a short measure of length, the distance from the elbow to the fist, making pygmaos an adjective meaning “short”.)

Tauromachy is bull-fighting; alectryomachy is cock-fighting; and cyanarctomachy is a fight between a dog and a bear, the old “sport” of bear-baiting. But on a completely different note sphæromachy, “sphere fighting”, is the game of bowls.

There are many others, but I’ll finish with a personal favourite—batrachomyomachy (ˌbætrəˌkəʊmaɪˈɒməkɪ), a war between frogs and mice. The original Batrachomyomachia is a mock-heroic Classical Greek epic in the style of Homer’s Iliad. No-one seems to be entirely sure of the identity of its author. A frog accidentally drowns a mouse, war is declared between mice and frogs, and the gods become involved in the resulting battle. It’s a short thing—you can read it in translation here.

Batrachomyomachia, Theodor Kittelsen 1885
Illustration by Theodor Kittelsen, 1885

So batrachomyomachy means “an overblown, trivial disagreement”—a storm in a teacup, a mountain out of molehill.

*As all fans of The Princess Bride already know, “that word” is “Inconceivable!” I’ve written more about that here.

Get An Email Subscription To The Oikofuge

or

Subscribe To Only The 'Words' Posts
(Be the first)
Words

Antilles

Leave a comment

ænˈtɪliːz

Antilles: an extensive archipelago of Caribbean islands, making up most of the West Indies

Virgin Islands from Tortola
Some Antilles: the Virgin Islands from Tortola (Click to enlarge)
© The Boon Companion, 2016

Still on a Caribbean kick, you’ll see. I confess I’m embarrassed that I’d spent a week in the Antilles before I thought:
1) Where does that word come from?
2) Does it have a singular?

Its origins are to some extent mysterious. The Antilles first appear on the Cantino planisphere (a Portuguese world map dating to 1502) as Las Antilhas del Rey de Castella, “The Antilles of the King of Spain”. That -ilhas suffix suggests that the Portuguese cartographers were thinking of this archipelago as the “[something] islands” and the obvious candidate for the origin of the first half of the word is anti-, “opposite”—the Antilles are the “opposite islands”, across the Atlantic from all the islands already known.

Detail from the Cantino planisphere
The Antilles
(Detail from the Cantino planisphere)

Case closed? Not quite. Because prior to the appearance of the Antilhas in their current location, cartographers had been plotting a large island in the middle of the Atlantic, named Antillia or Antilia. It was about 90 kilometres wide by 390 kilometres long, contained seven named cities, was surrounded by lesser islands … and was entirely mythical. No such place. The seven cities plotted on the island seem to be a reference to the legendary Island of the Seven Cities, supposedly discovered and settled by a party of Visigothic refugees fleeing the Moslem invasion of Iberia in the eighth century.

Antillia on a 1424 nautical chart
The curiously rectangular island of Antillia
(Detail from a 1424 nautical chart)

Antillia was of particular interest to Christopher Columbus, since it represented a potential stepping-stone in the mid-Atlantic for his voyage of discovery. He sought detailed knowledge of its location from the Florentine cosmographer Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, who wrote to tell him that he could expect to sail 1,000 miles from the Canary Islands to Antillia, and then 2,500 miles from Antillia to Cipangu (Japan).

Cover of No Longer On The MapThere have been suggestions that the appearance of Antillia on maps dating from more than a century before Columbus’s voyages suggests that someone had made landfall in the New World and brought back a story to tell the map-makers. It certainly seems likely that after Columbus’s voyages, the name of Antillia was transferred to the Antilles. So do we know the origin of Antillia?

Not really. While Antilha, “opposite island”, seems plausible (you can even imagine Antillia arising from Antilha by a copying error), there seem to be no maps in existence that actually spell Antillia that way. Indeed, the earliest maps use Atulae, Atilae or Attiaela. But there doesn’t seem to be any convincing alternative etymology. People have tried to make connections with Plato’s Atlantis, with the Roman Empire’s Getulia (in the Atlas mountains), with the island the Greeks called Thule (usually identified with Iceland), and with the Arabic al-Tin (“the dragon”, for the sea-dragons commonly shown at the edges of nautical maps of the time). But it all seems a bit of a stretch.

Cover of Phantom Islands Of The AtlanticSo the best we can say is that Antilles seems to derive from mythical Antillia, of uncertain etymology—and by the time the name was applied to the Caribbean islands, Portuguese cartographers were spelling it as if it had something to do with “opposite islands”.

For much more on Antillia, and other mythical islands, see Raymond H. Ramsay’s No Longer on the Map, and Donald S. Johnson’s Phantom Islands of the Atlantic.

Is there a singular? An “Antille” or “Antilla” or “Antil”? Sadly, no. Like trousers and scissors and West Indies and Balkans, Antilles is a plurale tantum—a noun that exists only in the plural. (The Latin grammatical tag looks very grand, but it just means “plural only”. It reminds me of Rob Buckman‘s story of the patient who consulted a dermatologist, who told him he was suffering from erythema annulare centrifugum. “So what does that mean?” asked the patient. The dermatologist explained that it meant he had a rash made up of expanding rings of red inflammation. “Well, I could have told you that,” said the patient.)

So to create a singular, we need to use some sort of circumlocution: something like, “an island in the Antilles,” or, “one of the Antilles.”

And there are a lot of Antilles, including several subcategories of Antilles.

Geographically, there are the Greater Antilles (the large islands of Cuba, Hispaniola, Jamaica and Puerto Rico, with the nearby Cayman Islands tucked in for completeness) and the Lesser Antilles (the island arc that sweeps southwards from the Virgin Islands to Trinidad, and then westwards along the north coast of Venezuela).

So far so good. But the Lesser Antilles are subdivided into the Windward Islands, the Leeward Islands, and the Leeward Antilles. That’s not remotely confusing, is it? The Windwards were the first islands a ship sailing with the prevailing, easterly trade-winds would encounter on arrival in the Caribbean—so the most easterly bulge of the island chain. Going northwards, the chain turns progressively more towards the west as it bends towards the Virgin Islands—west, downwind, leeward. So those are the Leeward Islands. The current conventional demarcation between Leeward Islands and Windward Islands is the Dominica Passage between Guadeloupe and Dominica, though the line has varied historically. After all, it’s difficult to draw a line through a north-south island chain that logically divides into leeward and windward portions relative to an east wind.

Lesser Antilles
Click to enlarge
(Original source)

The Windwards extend south to Trinidad, but don’t include that island. Ironically, they don’t include Barbados, either, which is the most windward of all the Antilles, and which was once part of a now-defunct political entity, the British Windward Islands.

(It’s usually round about now my tension headache starts to develop.)

OK. So the Leeward Antilles are, at least, incontrovertibly leeward of the rest of the Lesser Antilles. They are the chain of small islands stretching along the Venezuelan coast west of Trinidad. Most belong to Venezuela, but at the western end sit the so-called ABC Islands: Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao, which are part of the Netherlands (another geographical plurale tantum, by the way).

So much for physical geography. But there’s a set of political Antilles, too.

The Spanish Antilles need not detain us long—as my little detail from the Cantino planisphere above suggests, that was a general label for the Spanish settlements in the Antilles in the days when the Caribbean was a Spanish lake. (For reasons known only to themselves, philatelists seem to use the term to designate stamps issued by Spanish colonies in Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic [so far, so good] and the Philippines. If I dwell on that for too long I will go insane.)

Next up, the Antilles Françaises, the French Antilles, which in English are often called the French West Indies. These are the French islands within the Lesser Antilles—Guadeloupe and Martinique (two overseas departments of France); Saint-Martin and Saint-Barthélemy (two territorial collectivities of France). I was walking through Terre-de-Haut (an island that’s administratively part of Guadeloupe) a couple of weeks ago, and remarking on how well-kept the roads and pavements were, compared to some other Caribbean islands. The Boon Companion pointed out that, since Guadeloupe was legally part of France, some small part of our taxes was contributing, via the European Union, to the level surface on which we were walking. This seemed both cheering and dispiriting in equal measure.

And then there were the Netherlands Antilles. These consisted of the ABC islands in the Leeward Antilles, mentioned earlier (Aruba, Bonaire, Curaçao), together with three possessions in the Windward Islands (Sint Maarten, Saba, Sint Eustatius) collectively called the SSS islands. Just to complicate matters Sint Maarten is merely the southern half of an island, the northern half of which is French Saint-Martin. (There are no border formalities.)

French Antilles and Netherlands Antilles
French Antilles (red), former Netherlands Antilles (blue)
Click to enlarge
(Original source)

The Netherlands Antilles were a constituent country within the Kingdom of the Netherlands, but they disbanded in 2010, and there’s no such place any more. Instead, the Kingdom of the Netherlands now contains four constitutionally equal countries: the Netherlands, Aruba, Curaçao and Sint Maarten. The remaining islands (Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba) are administered from the Netherlands as municipalities, and are referred to as either the Caribbean Netherlands or the BES islands. (No, I don’t know why Sint Eustatius went from being an “S” in “SSS” to an “E” in “BES”. You’ll have gathered by now that the naming conventions in the Antilles just haven’t been thought through clearly, in my opinion.)

Got all that? Good. But you’re still dying to know the difference between the West Indies and the Antilles, aren’t you? I thought so.

The West Indies is made up of the Antilles and the Lucayan Archipelago. The Lucayan Archipelago is the big chain of islands stretching from Cuba to Florida—mainly the Bahamas, but also including the British territory of the Turks and Caicos Islands.

Greater Antilles & Lucayan Archipelago
Click to enlarge
(Original source)

It’s called the Lucayan Archipelago in memory of the Lucayan people, who were its inhabitants when Columbus first came ashore in 1492. They called themselves Lukku-Cairi, “people of the islands”, and Lucayan is an English distortion of that name. By 1513, every single one of them had vanished into slavery, and their islands were deserted.

Here’s an Euler diagram of the whole Antilles mess:

Euler diagram of the Antilles
Click to enlarge
Get An Email Subscription To The Oikofuge

or

Subscribe To Only The 'Words' Posts
Words

Aegophony

2 Comments

iːˈɡɒfənɪ

ægophony: a characteristic “bleating” quality heard in conducted voice-sounds when listening to the chest over an area of consolidated lung

When I was a medical student, we spent a lot of time listening to patient’s chests with our stethoscopes. Two things we were told to listen for were bleating ægophony and whispering pectoriloquy, which always sounded to me like the names of two Mafia mobsters—you wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of Tony “Bleating” Igofonni or Franky “Whispering” Pectoriloque.

Bleating ægophony is largely tautological—it says the same thing twice, because ægophony means “goat-sound”, from the Greek aix, “goat”.  Goats don’t really do much vocalizing apart from bleating, so I’m glad to see that the clinical sign is now more often called just plain ægophony (or egophony in the United States, where they have an unreasoning antipathy to the æ diphthong).

What’s happening with ægophony is that lung tissue which contains no air conducts sound differently from normal lung tissue. In particular, it tends to trim out lower frequency sounds. So the conducted sound of the patient’s voice takes on a high-pitched, bleating quality when the clinician listens over the abnormal lung.

The word ægis is related to Greek aix, “goat”. In mythology, it was a shield or breastplate used by a god—Zeus or Athena. The name probably comes from the fact that such objects were often fashioned from goatskin. The phrase under the ægis of used to mean “under the protection of [some powerful entity]”, but has slowly evolved until it is more often used to mean just “under the control of”.

Ear from Gray's Anatomy (1918)
Source

In Greek, a male goat was tragos. It is the origin, albeit obscurely, of our word tragedy. The serious style of Greek play that Aristotle defined as evoking “pity and horror” was referred to as tragœdia, “goat-song”, but no-one seems to be entirely sure why. The Roman poet Horace claimed that the origin of the word was a custom that the winner of choral competitions would receive a goat as a prize. While that certainly seems tragic if true, it doesn’t really seem to link perfectly to the tradition of Greek tragedy. Tragos has also given us tragus, the little flap of cartilage at the entrance to the ear, which in older men will often sprout a tuft of hair like the beard on a billy-goat—another tragedy, of sorts.

To the Greeks, a female goat was chimaira, which for some reason was also the name given to a fabulous monster in Greek mythology, with the head of a lion, the body of a goat and the tail of a snake. In English, as chimera, it’s a word for any combination of mismatched parts, including organisms that contain cells from several different sources.

In Latin, a male goat was caper, and a female goat, capra. A capriole or cabriole is a goat-like leap, as is a caper. The word cabriole in turn led to cabriolet, a type of two-wheeled horse-drawn carriage that tended to bounce along because it was light and had good suspension. These were often available for hire, and the word was soon contracted to cab, which is still applied to taxis today. If you experience a mental goat-like leap, you have a caprice; you are capricious. And a piece of music that bounds around in a lively fashion is a capriccio.

Something that pertains to goats is caprine, and something goat-shaped is capriform. There’s also a word caprigenous, “produced by a goat”, but it has relatively few applications beyond wool and cheese. Something goat-footed (like the god Pan) is a capriped, and something goat-horned is a capricorn—hence the Latin name of the zodiacal constellation, the He-Goat.

And while we’re talking about stars, the Romans had a diminutive, capella, applied to she-goats and kids, which is the name of the brightest star in the constellation Auriga. The star Capella represents the mythical she-goat that nursed the infant Zeus, whom he rewarded by translating her into the heavens.

Another Latin word for a male goat was hircus, and that gives us words for various goatish unpleasantness: something hircose or hircinous smells like a goat; hircine may indicate both smelliness and lustfulness. (And we’ve all had someone like that in our lives, haven’t we?)

And then there’s hirquitalliency, apparently from the Latin hirquitallire, “to resemble a billy-goat”. The Latin word was reputedly applied to boys passing through puberty, in reference to their breaking voices and lustfulness. Unfortunately, in the only use of hirquitalliency recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary, it is applied to a woman, and its meaning is a little unclear. It was coined in 1652 by Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty: translator of Rabelais, inventor of a universal language, inveterate word-coiner, and impenetrable prose stylist. I think he used the word to imply a certain amount of lustful feminine vocalizing, but I’ll let you judge for yourself. Here’s the relevant passage from his Ekskybalauron:

Thus for a while their eloquence was mute, and all they spoke was but with the eye and hand, yet so persuasively, by vertue of the intermutual unlimitedness of their visotactil sensation, that each part and portion of the persons of either was obvious to the sight and touch of the persons of both; the visuriency of either, by ushering the tacturiency of both, made the attrectation of both consequent to the inspection of either. Here it was that passion was active, and action passive, they both being overcome by other, and each the conquerour. To speak of her hirquitalliency at the elevation of the pole of his microcosme, or of his luxuriousness to erect a gnomon on her horizontal dyal, will perhaps be held by some to be expressions full of obscoeness, and offensive to the purity of chaste ears; yet seeing she was to be his wife, and that she could not be such without consummation of marriage, which signifieth the same thing in effect, it may be thought, as definitiones logicae verificantur in rebus, if the exerced act be lawful, that the diction which suppones it, can be of no greater transgression, unless you would call it a solaecisme, or that vice in grammar which imports the copulating of the masculine with the feminine gender.

Phwoar.

Note: In case you’re wondering, pectoriloquy is “chest speaking”—being able to hear conducted speech sounds in the patient’s chest with a stethoscope. Whispering (or whispered) pectoriloquy is being able to hear whispered speech in the same way, which is not normally possible, but which (like ægophony) occurs over areas of lung that contain no air.

Get An Email Subscription To The Oikofuge

or

Subscribe To Only The 'Words' Posts
(Be the first)
Phenomena, Words

Nacreous

Leave a comment

ˈneɪkriːəs

nacreous: pertaining to or resembling mother-of-pearl

Nacreous cloud
Source

Nacreous clouds are in the UK news at present, with multiple sightings in Scotland. There was an interesting divide in the BBC news coverage of the phenomenon this evening, with national newsreader George Alagiah intoning some twaddle about “forming at sunset” and “caused by refraction” in a sing-song voice, as if delivering a boring bedtime story. Whereas the BBC Scotland weather presenter, Gillian Smart, got the story right and had some nice pictures, too.

Nacreous clouds form in the low stratosphere, which is pretty high for a cloud. They’re present at all times of the day and night, but are more visible before sunrise and after sunset, when they are the first things to catch the sunlight, and the last to lose it, by virtue of their altitude. Their colours are due to diffraction, not refraction.

But this is a post about words, not natural phenomena.

Nacreous means “pertaining to nacre“. Nacre is the iridescent substance that lines many varieties of sea-shells, most notably those of pearl-forming oysters—it’s therefore commonly known as mother-of-pearl. The word comes to us from the Romance languages—it has analogues in French, Portuguese, Spanish and Italian—but its early origins remain obscure.

Nacre also provides the characteristic sheen on the surface of a pearl. And it’s interesting that a simple little world like pearl should also be a puzzle to etymologists. There are tentative links to Latin perula, a diminutive of perum, “pear”; or to a hypothesized diminutive pernula of perna, “leg of mutton” (from the shape of a mussel shell); or to  pilula, “globule”. Take your pick.

In Latin, a pearl is margarita, and in Greek, margarites.  Just as Pearl is a woman’s name in English, so Margarita is in Spanish. Margaret and Margery are its English-language equivalents. Margarita is also the Spanish word for “daisy”, though the connection between the pearl and the flower is obscure. The connection between the flower and the various cocktails called “daisies” is also obscure—at one time there was a Whiskey Daisy, a Gin Daisy and a Brandy Daisy, but the Tequila Daisy was the one that became most popular, and took the name margarita for itself.

Margarita also gave us the name for margaric acid, a mixture of fatty acids with a pearl-like lustre. Margarins were chemical derivatives of margaric acid, and margarine is a butter-like substance that took its name from the margarins, although chemically unrelated.

Something that looks pearly is margaritaceous, and something that produces pearls is margaritiferous.

Oyster comes from Latin ostrea and Greek ostreon. Something that resembles an oyster is ostracine, ostraceous or ostreaceous. The farming of oysters is ostreiculture.

An ostrakon (plural ostraka) is an archaeological find—a shard of pottery that has been used to jot down a note, something that was common practice in Ancient Greece. The Greeks called these pottery shards ostraka because of their curving resemblance to oyster shells. Votes were cast using ostraka, in particular when citizens voted for the banishment of one of their number. Such banishment was called ostrakismos—which gives us our word ostracism, meaning “exclusion”.

Get An Email Subscription To The Oikofuge

or

Subscribe To Only The 'Words' Posts
Words

Advesperate

Leave a comment

ædˈvɛspəreɪt

advesperate: to draw towards night

Evening sun in East Greenland © 2007 Marion McMurdo
The day advesperates in East Greenland. Click to enlarge
© 2007 The Boon Companion

Writing about crepuscular rays recently reminded me that there are two kinds of crepuscule (twilight): matutine, from the Latin matutinus, “morning”, and vespertine from vespertinus, “evening”.

Vespertinus is of course the origin of vespers, the evening prayer in some versions of Christianity. And it gives us my headword for this post, to advesperate. In the days when scientists spoke Latin to each other, a bat was a vespertilio, from their habit of taking flight at dusk. The Italian language mangled this slowly over the centuries, from vespertillo to vispertello to vipistrello to pipistrello, from which last we get the English word pipistrelle, for a small bat.

Thomas Hardy seems to have coined the word vespering, “flying westwards”, in his poem The Year’s Awakening, but it hasn’t seen much use since. It does let me point out the obvious connection between “ves-” and “west”, however. The sun sets in the west, and the linguistic link between evening and the west goes right back to a Proto-Indo-European root reconstructed as wespero-. The first syllable of that root was adopted into the Germanic languages, and ended up in English in both west and Visigoth (“western Goth”). Wespero- got into Latin almost unchanged, and gave us all those vespertine words I’ve described already; and in Greek it appeared as hespera, meaning both “evening” and “west”. Hesperus was a minor mythological character (according to Lemprière, he was an obscure brother of Atlas); his only claim to fame is as the personification of the planet Venus in its role as the Evening Star.

Lemprière's Classical DictionaryAs the Morning Star, Venus had two other names—Phosphorus, “light bringer”, or Eosphorus, “Dawn Bringer”.* Eos was the Greek goddess of the dawn, and (from the colour of the dawn sky) she gives her name to the red dye eosin.  Her name goes back to a Proto-Indo-European root aus-, which supplied the English language with east, Austria (“eastern kingdom”) and Ostrogoth (“eastern Goth”).

The Roman name for Eos was Aurora. So the aurora borealis is literally “dawn in the north”. The Romans saw a resemblance to a sunrise because, when the Northern Lights are strong enough to appear as far south as Rome, they are often tinged with red—the Emperor Tiberius once called out the fire-fighters when he glimpsed an auroral glow in the sky over the port of Ostia.

The Romans, who had a deeply confusing attitude to the names of their gods, also called Aurora Mater Matuta, “mother morning”. Which brings me neatly back to the Latin matutinus, “the morning”, the origin of our word matutine, “pertaining to the morning”, which helped me start this post. Matutinus also gives us matins, the morning prayers that are a counterpart to vespers. Matutinal means “in the morning” and matutinally means “every morning”.

And finally there’s matutolypea, “ill humour in the morning”—one of the reasons so few of these posts appear before midday. Matutolypea is a hybrid word, built from Latin matuta and Greek lype “sorrow”. Sadly, it seems to be one of those words that is never seen in the wild, only ever appearing in lists of unusual words. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a need for it …

*Given that the Ancient Greeks had different names for Venus according to whether it appeared in the morning or evening sky, you might ask whether they properly understood that it was just one object, seen in different positions at different times. They seem to have sorted that out quite early:

Eosphoros and Hesperos are one and the same, although in ancient times they were thought to be different. Ibycus of Rhegium was the first to equate the titles.

Ibycus of Rhegium, Fragment 331, 6th Century BC

Get An Email Subscription To The Oikofuge

or

Subscribe To Only The 'Words' Posts
(Be the first)