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Hope

Etymology Lesson: hope

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Pandora, by J.W. Waterhouse.

From Old English, hopa meaning, “wish, expectation.”

There are theories that it is related to the word hop, as in, “leaping forward in expectation.”  In the myth of Pandora’s Box, the last evil to escape the box is Hope.  Some say hope is what saves the world, some say there is a reason it was locked inside the box with all the other evils.  Hope is a dangerous siren, luring us to believe in things that will never be.  Tempting us to betray our instincts and abandon our better intellect, blindly trusting that things will turn out the way we wish them to, instead of accepting the truth of what they are.

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Saeculum

Back at it!

Today’s Etymology Lesson comes from my friend Seth, with his selection of the word saeculum, recently featured in the Sandman graphic novel.

From proto-indo-european, sey, meaning “to bind or tie together,” the word can be found in the Latin phrase saecula saeculorum, meaning, “a lifetime of lifetimes,” or “eternity.”

The saeculum is a measure of time, generally springing from a singular event (a war, catastrophe, etc) which encapsulates the time that any human could have personally experienced the event.  For example, we are approaching a time in which anyone who personally experienced WWI would be deceased, the war began over 100 years ago in 1914, and ended in 1918.  There are likely babies who were born at that time who are over 100 years old, but the saeculum of WWI is nearly over. 

Pictured is Sergeant Stubby, decorated war hero of the 102nd Infantry, survivor of 17 battles on the Western Front, and member of the saeculum of WWI, who died peacefully in his sleep in 1926 at the age of 10.

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Solstice

Friday Etymology Lesson: solstice

This is the last one of the year!  Maybe I’ll start up again in the New Year with a blog or something (oh hey look, I did!). 

As the Winter Solstice is on Sunday, today’s word is solstice.  From Latin, sol meaning, “sun,” and sistere meaning, “to make stand still,” solstice literally means “the point at which the sun is made to stand still.”  The ancient Celts called it Yule, from the Norse word Jul, meaning, “wheel.”  They believed the goddess Frigga wove the fate of the world at her spinning wheel, and she labored long through the darkest night to birth the light. 

The Egyptians believed Isis labored and birthed Horus at the solstice.  In Persian myth, the warrior god Mithras was born at the winter solstice, as was Jesus of Nazareth, Saturn, Quetzalcoatl, and Sarasvati, the Hindu queen of heaven.  

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The light of the rising sun on the winter solstice inside the prehistoric monument Newgrange in County Meath Ireland.
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Betrothed

Thursday Etymology Lesson: betrothed

This one goes out to my cousin Andy and his new bride Elisa, who got surprise married yesterday!  Congrats!  Today’s word is betrothed, which literally means, “be truthful to each other.”  The word truth has roots (pun intended) way back to the Proto-Indo-European words drū, meaning, “tree”, and deru, meaning, “firm, solid.”  We are so happy to add you to our family tree, Elisa! 

The Tree of Life,1905 by Gustav Klimt

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Splendid

Wednesday Etymology Lesson: splendid

Today’s word is inspired by all of the lovely holiday decorations up around the city. Splendid, from the Latin splendidus, meaning, “to shine brilliantly and magnificently.” From Proto-Indo-European splend, which meant, “to be manifest, to be undeniably evident to the senses.”  Pictured is the Resplendent Quetzal, native to Central America, considered divine by both the Aztecs and Maya, revered as a symbol of goodness and light, and associated with their creator god, Quetzalcoatl.  Splendid, no?

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Know

Tuesday Etymology Lesson: know

From the Latin gnoscere, and the Greek gno.  You’ll recognize gno from the words gnostic and gnosis, meaning, “knowledge, enlightenment or oneness with god.”

For millennia humans have feared knowledge and advancement as they would the supernatural.  The myth of Prometheus is the perfect example of this.  Prometheus the Titan, chained to a stone to endure physical torture for all eternity, simply for giving mankind the flaming spark of knowledge.  Or the myth of Adam & Eve, cast out from paradise because they dared to eat from the tree of knowledge. 

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El suplicio de Prometeo (The torture of Promethus), Jean-Louis-Cesar Lair, 1819.

For thousands of years we imprisoned, tortured, and burned the best minds among us for daring to know information about the mysteries of the universe.  Then when we were done murdering them, we elevated them as martyrs, saints, and geniuses, setting them above us and away from us, never accepting that we are all capable of the same knowing, failing to realize the fullest potential of our humanity.  Ignorance is bliss.  This is the greatest tragedy of the human race. 

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Liminal

Monday Etymology Lesson: liminal

From the Latin liminalis or limen meaning, “threshold,” from which we also get the word limit.  Liminal describes a place between two defined spaces, without ever fully belonging to either of them. 

In mythology these thresholds or liminal spaces are often the realm of deities.  Able to pass between the realms of the living and the dead, the messengers Hermes, Ganesha, and the trickster spirit Eshu in voodoo tradition, are all liminal deities. 

The Romans worshiped Janus, god of gates, doorways, and beginnings, for whom we get the name of our first month, January, the gate of the new year.  Janus is shown as having two faces, one facing backward to the past, and one facing toward the future. Here he is depicted pacifying the Roman war goddess Bellona, sister of Mars, to restore peace.

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Fart

Friday Etymology Lesson: fart

Sigh, my friend John Adams insisted on this one, so you get what you asked for, the etymology of fart.

One of the oldest words in the English vocabulary, fart comes from two Proto-Indo-European words perd, meaning, “break wind loudly,” and pezd “break wind softly.”  Obviously these two words are onomatopoeias.  I’ve mentioned before that d sounds often morph into t sounds in Indo-European.  Well, the same thing happened with p and f sounds, so from perd we got furzen in German, which became fart in English.

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The Divine Gas, mural art for the Boston ICA by Chiho Aoshima.

Speaking of the English, their custom of rhyming slang gave us raspberry tart as a slang term for fart, which is why it’s called a raspberry when you make a fart sound like Lily Tomlin used to do at the end of her Edith Ann character skits.  Aaaaand now I’m dating myself.

 

edithann
And that’s the truth! Phbbt!
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Phenomenon

Thursday Etymology Lesson: phenomenon

Two words for the price of one today!  Phenomenon from the Ancient Greek word phaínō, meaning “I show.”  In Latin phaenomenon, meaning, “appearance, particularly in the sky” and noumenon, from Greek nous, meaning, “I think, I mean, perception, intuition, understanding.” 

In a way phenomenon is the opposite of noumenon, because a phenomenon is a thing that is seen and observed, and a noumenon is a thing that is known (or maybe unknown?) without being seen. 

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Noumenon, sculpture by Jan Kuck.

Confused yet?  In simple terms, noumenon represents a thing outside of the sensory filters we use to perceive the natural world.  Humans tend to provide names and stories about objects in order to accept them as known.  Stories like, this is a table, I sit in a chair, I am separate from you, you are separate from me.  The concept of a noumenal world is necessary if one believes that our understanding of the world is not limited to what we can perceive with our senses.  It may sound floofy, but in a way, science would not exist without this concept.  

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Melancholy

Wednesday Etymology Lesson: melancholy

This one’s a bummer, folks.  Today’s word is melancholy [sad trombone].  The word itself comes from the Ancient Greek words kholḗ meaning, “gall, or bile,” and mélas meaning, “dark, black, murky.”  You’ll recognize mélas from the word melanin. 

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Melancholy,1801, by French painter Constance Marie Charpentier

Back in medieval times, physicians believed that the body had four humors, which were basically four bodily fluids, blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile.  These humors corresponded to the four elements, air, water, fire, earth respectively.  They could become imbalanced for any number of reasons.  Ancient physicians believed that a melancholic state of depression or great sadness was caused by an excess of black bile, or earth, in the body originating in the spleen.  Treatments for excessive black bile included, of course, blood letting by way of leeches, mistletoe poisoning, consumption of moist warm foods, and dancing!