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A reader recently asked if we could explain the names of certain mythical animals and legendary creatures. Well, this is quite a large topic and, rather than give a perfunctory reply in Words to the Wise, we thought we'd take time to answer it in a more leisurely fashion here. To prepare for this column we read through some medieval bestiaries (in translation). Bestiaries were books which described the animals of the world and, usually, derived some moral from their habits. Their compilers made no distinction between real and legendary animals as, to them, they were all real. Sometimes perfectly real animals are described in such a fantastic fashion as to occasion disbelief. Take, for instance, the antelope which was said to have saw-shaped horns which it used to fell trees. And the description of the crocodile begins "The Cocodryllus is so called from its crocus or saffron color". Ah, yes, lumberjack antelopes and bright yellow crocodiles... those were the days! We are all familiar with the legendary animal which looks like a horse with a single horn projecting from its forehead. It is, of course, the unicorn but what would you call a creature with a body resembling that of a horse, the head of a deer, the feet of an elephant, and the tail of a lion, with one black horn projecting two cubits [about 3 feet] from the middle of the forehead. This is how Pliny described the unicornus (Latin uni- "one" + cornus "horn"), an animal which the Greeks knew as the monoceros (Greek mono- "one" + ceros "horn"). Cornus is also the root of cornucopia (Latin "the horn of plenty") which was fabled to be the horn of the goat Amalthea which suckled the infant Zeus. Pedants who wish to show off their knowledge of Latin insist that it be written cornucopiae (plural cornuscopiae). Medieval scholars firmly believed that every land animal had an equivalent in the sea. Thus, the existence of the narwhal (a whale with a single horn) was seen as confirming the unicorn's reality. Many of our readers will be familiar with the medieval notion of how unicorns are caught: a naked virgin (preferably beautiful) stands in the forest and waits for a unicorn to come along, the unicorn is so impressed with the purity of the virgin that he lays his head in her lap and the hunter slips a halter around his neck. Some authorities have suggested that this is a distant echo of an Indian tale about catching a rhinoceros (Greek "horn-nose", from rhinos "nose" + ceros "horn"). In this unlikely tale, a trained female monkey strokes the rhino until he falls asleep. While find this one a little hard to swallow, we deem it quite possible that the odd "unicorn hunter" may have persuaded virgins to disrobe in the forest. There is only one phoenix (or fenix). The distinctive feature of this Arabian bird is that every 500 years or so, when it feels death approaching, it immolates itself on a pyre of fragrant spices. Soon thereafter, a worm crawls out of the ashes and grows up to become the next phoenix. The name phoenix is Greek for "Phoenician" because the bird was said to be purple and Phoenicia was the source of a purple dye which was so valuable that, in Roman times, only the nobility were permitted to wear it. The dye (sometimes called Tyrian purple) was extracted from a species of shellfish which the Greeks called porphyra. This became purpura in Latin and, after a little phonetic mangling, purple in English. The purple, igneous rock called porphyry takes its name directly from the Greek. The dragon is perhaps the most famous of all legendary creatures. Dragon was the Old French version of the Latin dracon which in turn was a form of the Greek drakon (from Greek derkesthai "to see clearly"). Apparently, dragons have keen eyesight. The military dragoon was armed with a dragon - in this instance, a crude musket which belched flame like a dragon. Though, actually, the dragons of legend breathed fire only in paintings. Those who study Gothic iconography tell us that the painted flames were merely an indication of poisonous breath and sometimes this was denoted by frogs and snakes instead of fire. There was a rank of draconarius (Latin for "dragon bearer") in the Roman army. This prestigious title was borne by the standard-bearer of a platoon because the standard was was often in the form of a dragon. Old Welsh borrowed this word to form dragwn "cavalry troop". By a misunderstanding, this word spawned the legend of Uther Pendragon, King Arthur's supposed father. The earliest treatment of the Arthurian legend is written in Old Welsh by an author known to us as Nennius. He wrote "arthur mab uthr pen dragwn..." which meant "Arthur, the wild child, head of the cavalry troop..." Unfortunately, when Geoffrey of Monmouth (fl. 1100 A.D.) was writing his version, he took this passage to mean "Arthur, child of Uther Pendragon...". Geoffrey then had to account for Uther, so he concocted a tale which, in our humble opinion, is suspiciously similar to the story of Nectanebo in the Late Latin "Romance of Alexander". Owain Glyndwr (c. 1349-1416), the leader of the last Welsh rebellion against England, chose a red dragon as his standard because of an ancient prophecy. The English countered by adopting Saint George, the dragon-slayer, as their patron saint. Owain's red dragon standard is now the national flag of Wales. There were many Teutonic legends about treasure-hoarding dragons. This is why the Anglo-Saxons, when they discovered that some of the Bronze Age and Iron Age burial mounds contained gold and silver, they called them dragon hills. But, as we have seen, dragon was a French word which came over with the Norman invaders so what word did the Anglo-Saxons use? Worm. Yes, this word meant any long, roughly cylindrical creature whether it be a lowly earthworm, a snake or even a monstrous dragon. Well, as we have barely scratched the surface of this fascinating topic we will definitely return to it at some later date. Before we leave, though, we simply must offer you more slices of lunacy from the minds of the medieval scribes... |
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Curmudgeons' CornerGuest curmudgeon Dr. Moffatt whines about this weekend. Or is it next weekend?
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Sez You... |
From Greg Umberson:
Thanks for the explanation, Greg. |
From Mats Tölöberg:
From W. Russ Long: From Steve Parkes: From Rick Booth:
Yes, it seems that you are all right. We found our explanation in an online dictionary of technological terms but we must say that's the last time we trust anything we read on the web. ;-) |
From Noah Sturr:
Missing link? For a moment, we assumed that you meant the recently discovered fossil of an upright, bipedal humanoid. The remains have been carbon-dated and appear to be 4,500,000 years old. ("Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday dear apeman...") Rest assured, Noah, that we will add the Oxford English Dictionary site to our links page. The OED is an extremely valuable resource but we must warn you that the subscription fees are quite high. |
From Rick Booth:
Thanks, Rick. We do own (and use) the two books you reference above but the last time we searched for them at Amazon.com to place in our book store, we couldn't get them. We do admit it's been a while and we'll search again in the next few weeks.
You are entirely welcome. Thanks for reading it. |
From Jean Jacobi:
1) Thanks, Jean 2) Oh, what a silly bludner! It's a good job we didn't write it ourselves. |
Laughing Stock |
The following is yet another example of what passes for humor on the internet these days. It is sexist, highly offensive and not at all funny. In fact, we strongly advise that you not read it. |
DISCRETION ADVISED WHEN UPGRADING!Last year a friend of mine upgraded from Girlfriend 4.0 to Wife 1.0 and found that it's a memory hog leaving few system resources for other applications. He is also now noticing that Wife 1.0 is also spawning child-processes which are further consuming valuable resources. No mention of this particular phenomenon was included in the product documentation, though other users have informed me that this is to be expected due to the nature of the application. Not only that, Wife 1.0 installs itself so that it is always launched at system initialization where it can monitor all other system activity. Some applications such as PokerNite 10.3, Bachelor Party 2.5, and Pubnite 7.0 are no longer able to run in the system at all, causing the system to lock up when launched (even though these apps worked fine before). Wife 1.0 provides no installation options. Thus, the installation of undesired plug-ins such as mother-in-law 55.8 and the Brother-in-law Beta is unavoidable. Also, system performance seems to diminish with each passing day. Some features my friend would like to see in the upcoming Wife 2.0:
I myself wish I had decided to avoid all of the headaches associated with Wife 1.0 by sticking with Girlfriend 3.0. Even here, however, I had found many problems. Apparently you cannot install girlfriend 4.0 on top of Girlfriend 3.0. You must uninstall Girlfriend 3.0 first, otherwise the two versions of Girlfriend will have conflicts over shared use of the I/O port. Other users have told me that this is a long-standing problem that I should have been aware of. To make matters worse, the uninstall program for Girlfriend 3.0 doesn't work very well, leaving undesirable traces of the application in the system. Another identified problem is that all versions of Girlfriend continually pop-up annoying little messages about the advantages of upgrading to Wife 1.0.
************************************ All users should be aware that Wife 1.0 has an undocumented bug. If you try to install Mistress 1.1 before uninstalling Wife 1.0, Wife 1.0 will delete MSMoney files before doing the uninstall itself. Then for some reason Mistress 1.1 won't install at all, claiming insufficient resources. To avoid the aforementioned bug, try installing Mistress 1.1 on a different system and never run any file transfer applications (such as Laplink) between the two systems. |
Wasn't that just awful, girls? Well don't say you weren't warned. |
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