Mighty Deep Roots

Avocado

I'm going to assume here that you know what an Avocado is.  If not, then you have problems that this blog cannot solve for you.  Mostly the absence of great deliciousness in your world.

They're delicious.  They're fun to cut (to me, anyway).  They can be smooshed and mixed with spices to create the perfect thing to dip chips into.  So, where does the word come from?  Well, apparently, avocado is a Spanish bastardization of the Aztec word ahucatl.  It's probably best that the Spanish didn't seem to know what this means.  Testicle.  It means testicle.  I assume that, since Avocados are also sometimes called "alligator pears" (for obvious reasons), that what you're eating is alligator testicles.  Delicious, soft, wrinkly alligator testicles.

Narcissus, Narcissism, and Daffodils

You know, of course, the story of Narcissus: the vain, beautiful youth who met his end in various ways because he thought he was so darned pretty. We get two English words from this story: narcissism and Narcissus, which is the flower said to have grown in the spot where Narcissus met his end.  The blooms of the flower tend to dip, and when they grow on the slope by a stream they do seem to be gazing at their own reflections.

What I find most interesting about this, though, is that the Narcissus flower has a second, more common name: Daffodil.  This, too, likely comes from an entirely different part of Greek mythology.  It is thought that the name is a perversion of the word "Asphodel," a very different flower.  Asphodels were sometimes called Affodells in parts of Europe, and the "D" probably comes from the Dutch article "de."  It's not clear how the Narcissus started being called by this very different flower's name (but then, how did people keep anything straight before the internet?). 

The Asphodel itself has an interesting story in Greek mythology.  It was considered the favorite food of the dead, and was often planted on or near graves.  It also gave its name to the Asphodel Meadows, the middle of three sections of Tartarus, the place where judged souls spent their afterlives.  The other two sections are pretty standard: the Elysian Fields, where heroes went to have a joyful afterlife, and Tartarus, where the evil went to be tormented.  The Asphodel Meadows, on the other hand, was a plain of Asphodel flowers that was eternally home to those who had led boring lives, neither good nor evil.  There they spent eternity, going through the same boring motions in the afterlife that they did in life.  In some stories they are like automatons, with no choice but to repeat their lives over and over.  In others, they are stripped of their very identities by drinking from the River Lethe.  It's an interesting thought, that those who live boring lives are essentially damned to a boring afterlife (and, in the stories, it is very clearly a sort of damning).  It shows that the Greeks very much valued the hero, the man who makes stories, far more than the working man.  I wonder if, at the time, Tartarus was really considered a very much worse fate than was eternity among the Asphodels.

Complexity

I believe in the power of words, and even more so in the power of language.  It is the flexibility of language that gives it the power, though.  We adapt it to ourselves and each other.  It's the conduit to the world and each other.  It cannot, though, be captured in a book so cold and inflexible as a dictionary or thesaurus.  Language cannot be contained.  My glorious friend Lovely Lovable Lindsay captured this, and I blatantly stole it (with her permission, mind you).

The Etymology of Etymology

Etymology is an -ology (study) of etymons, The origins of a word.  This comes from the Greek word etumon, which means the true meaning or true sense of a word (the change came on its way through Latin).  This Greek word probably comes from (or is at least very closely related to) the word etumos, which means simply "True."  At least, you know, that's the word on the street.

This Greek word etumon seems like it could be useful to those of us who often find themselves discussing semantics and language.  There is often some sort of meaning to a word that goes deeper than etymology, connotation, or denotation.  The etumon, as I imagine it being used, expresses the sense of a word, something kin to the Platonic Ideal of it.  Someone remind me to use it.