Words of the Month - After the Odyssey

         Getting in one last outing on the Odyssey bandwagon, today’s words of the month are connected to the Homeric epics.  So of course the very first word has to be

        odyssey - Around 1600 (and possibly earlier) this was the title used in English for the epic poem that in ancient Greek was called Odysseia and in Latin Odyssea.  Apparently not until the end of the nineteenth century had the word gained a broader, more general application to describe any long, adventurous journey.

        Many other characters in Homer’s epics have contributed to English vocabulary, as well.

        mentor - Our word meaning “wise advisor, more-experienced counselor” comes straight from the character Mentor who advised Odysseus’s son Telemachus (although actually most of the time is wasn’t even Mentor himself doing the counseling, but Athena in disguise).  The word was being used this way in English by 1750, although for at least a century it continued to be capitalized, indicating that it was still a direct reference to the character.  Interestingly, the etymology of the name itself is “one who gives or has purpose, spirit,” and is related to the word monitor, which came from Latin and appeared in English in the 1540s.  Also, although Mentor appears in this role in the Odyssey, the adoption of the word probably owes more to a popular 1699 French novel by François Fénelon, in which Mentor is actually a main character.  It became a verb in the late nineteenth century.

        hector - In the Iliad, Hector urges his fellow Trojans to keep fighting, and the first usage of his name in English (in the late 14th century) denoted a valiant warrior.  Somewhere along the line, however, English apparently got tired of his aggressive nagging, and by the mid-seventeenth century the word meant “a blustering, turbulent fellow,” and also gained use as a verb “to bluster, bully” at the same time.

        Achilles heel - This one is Iliad-adjacent, since Homer doesn’t actually include the myth about how Achilles was invulnerable everywhere except the one spot on his heel where his mother held him while dipping him in the River Styx.  That later myth, however, gave us, by the early nineteenth century, the idiomatic phrase meaning “the one dangerous weakness in an otherwise strong person.”  It also gave us the anatomical term Achilles tendon, which was coined in modern Latin in the early eighteenth century.  In the mid-nineteenth century Linneaus gave the herb yarrow the Latin name Achillea, because Homer describes Achilles’s soldiers using it to treat their wounds.

        glaucous - English had the word glauk meaning “greyish-bluish-greenish” by the early fifteenth century, but the modern form of the word arrived in the 1670s by way of Latin.  Homer’s “grey-eyed Athena” was glauk-opis Athene.  Interestingly, in Homer’s Greek the word meant “bright, gleaming, silvery,” so Athena was really “bright-eyed” rather than “grey-eyed,” and it’s not clear why the meaning changed in English.  That makes it a little ironic that this is also where we get the medical term glaucoma (in the 1640s), from the greyish-bluish appearance of cataracts that un-brighten eyes.

        siren - I covered the etymology of this word for “an alarm sound” in my prior post The Lure of Sirens, but at the time I didn't know why characters famous for the beauty of their songs should lend their name to such a hideous noise.  I’ve since discovered that the device was named by Baron Charles Cagniard de la Tour, in 1819, when he discovered that his invention could make sound underwater as well as in air, suggesting to him creatures that he obviously pictured in their less avian and more mermaidesque version.

        cyclopean - This word referring to an ancient style of construction using huge, irregular stones fitted together without mortar, comes from the cyclopes of Greek mythology, but not Homer’s version.  Rather, it comes from another myth in which the one-eyed giants built the walls of Mycenae and Tiryns.  However, the word cyclopean can also be used with the definition “one-eyed,” and that meaning appears in English in the 1640s.

        Trojan horse - This “character” also appears less fully in Homer than in other tellings of the Trojan War, but by the early nineteenth century it was used metaphorically to refer to a threat which people allow in because it’s disguised as something benign.  The first use of the word to refer to malicious computer code that sneaks past security in disguise was apparently 1974.

        And finally, a couple of other non-character words from Homer.

        necromancy - This word comes from the title of the chapter in which Odysseus visits the Dead, but already by 1300 English had a version of the word, meaning “witchcraft, black magic” as much as “communication with the dead,” and we got that word from Old French (and thence from Latin, from Greek).  It isn’t entirely clear, therefore, whether the word came directly from Homer, or whether we got it more generally from Greek for divination by means of communication with the dead.

        nepenthe - This may be a fairly obscure word in English, but it always makes me think of the line from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”: “Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe…”  In any case, it means “something that makes a person forget all pain.”  In the Odyssey, Helen gives this anti-grief drug to Telemachus and Menelaus when they’re overcome with sorrow.  In Greek it’s nēpenthēs, but English speakers in the late sixteenth century quickly cut off the final -s because it sounded too plural.  (The same thing happened with pea.)

        kudos - This word probably entered English as university slang at the end of the eighteenth century, and it comes straight from Homer, where kydos means “glory, especially in battle.”  This is another Greek singular ending in -s, and once again English speakers have a tendency to interpret it as a plural.  For the most part, however, I think kudos functions as an uncountable noun or a plurale tantum, in which you can’t give only one kudo unless you’re being self-consciously cute.

        A few of those words, including odyssey, of course, are quite obviously related to the Homeric epics, but did any of them surprise you?

[Pictures: Mentor and Telemachus, engraving by Jean-Baptise Tilliard after drawing by Charles Monnet, from Les Aventures de Télémaque, 1785 (Image from Rijksmuseum);

Yarrow (Achillea), rubber block print by AEGNydam, 1997 (Image from George Fox and the Valiant Sixty by Elfrida Vipont);

The Trojan Horse, wood block print from the Strasbourg Virgil, 1502 (Image from Wikimedia Commons).]