More Greekish Fun
A couple of Greeky words I’ve learnt recently. All basically regurgitated OED. I don’t intend to harp on this too much, but my conscience requires me to tell you that you should really just get yourself an OED and look everything up instead of reading this.
- Cataclysm
-
This is Greek “cataclysmos”. From kata, “down”, and clyzein, “to wash, dash like a wave”.
In English it can mean any huge downpour, but is taken especially to refer to Noah’s flood — or as I call it, the Noachian deluge. Our more modern uses are pretty obvious extensions of this.
- Loosestrife
-
This lovely flower, ornament of our ditches, is known to the learned as lysimachion. Pliny states that oxen which are made to eat it are more willing to draw together. Hmm! Is loosestrife psychoactive? John Fletcher thought so! Take f’rinstance this from his 1610 Faithful Shepherdess: “Yellow Lecimachus, to giue sweete rest To the faint Shepheard.” Let a thousand flowers bloom, that’s what I say!
The lysi, to dissolve or “loose”, is familiar to us from many words, such as glycolysis and lysosome. They don’t call him lysosome “’cause he runs so fast”, despite what you may have heard. And who doesn’t recognize mach as Greekish “strife”?
Pliny also alleges that loosestrife was “discovered” by one Lysimachus, and hence the name. Sounds a little pat to me, but OED seems to credit it…
January 15th, 2004 at 1:59 am
How bout the Noachian diluvial catastrophe? Not as terse but has an interesting rhythm.
For the matter what do you call that metrical foot: u / u u? And maybe someone can answer my longstanding question of what actually constitutes a foot. It’s not the two-syllables, since many feet are three; and it’s not the single stress, because / / is a traditional foot. Is this another case of extreme and unremonstrable logical laxity in humanities scholarship? Or is there some principle behind it?
January 22nd, 2004 at 7:04 pm
I’m not sure whether u-uu would have a name of its own, exactly. I don’t
see anything corresponding to that in the prosody section of my grammar. But
if we write it out
Noachian diluvial catastrophe
u- uu u – uu u – u u
we can kind of see a foot like -uuu in the middle there. This is apparently
known as the paeon primus, one of the quinary or Hemiolic meters. It’s called
quinary because there are five “morae”, where a mora is the unit of time it
takes to say a short syllable, more or less. (as you know, that’s how the classical
meters do it: quantity not stress) A short syllable constitutes a single
mora, and a long syllable is two, so altogether there’s five in our paeon
primus.
I am definitely just blowing smoke out of my ass here, and have no idea how anybody would ever have used this foot, but perhaps we’d want this to be part of a longer line: let’s presumably incorrectly but indubitably glamourously call it a primal paeonic tetrameter. If I may be allowed to taste some Poe:
Somebody’s Noachian diluvial catastrophe discomforts me, G!
– u u u- uu u – uu u – u u u – u u u
Altogether, this shit is wicked complicated, and really there’s only two meters I
have learnt anything about: elegaic couplets and dactylic hexameters. When I look at Horace, I’m totally
baffled by what he’s doing with meter. He uses some weird, complicated Greek
voodoo schemes, best as I can tell.
So, is there some principle behind it all? Dunno! The Greeks probably had some clever mathematical thoughts about all this, but when it came to poetry, all the Romans ever did was bite off them.
January 23rd, 2004 at 4:13 pm
Man, all them Romans ever did at all was bite off other folks.
Wasn’t it Aristotle who said,
Caesar was a hero to most
But he never meant shit to me you see
Straight up racist that sucker was
Mean and he bust us
Mother fuck him and Augustus
You gotta fight the powers that be.
January 25th, 2004 at 4:12 pm
Pseudo-Aristotle might have bit that off Aristotle?
But I believe the original line in Aristotle (Timor Orbis Nigri I.87) actually refers to Orpheus, the “Elvis of the classical world”.
August 1st, 2007 at 8:34 pm
Actually, purple loosestrife, of which I must have been thinking here, is Lythrum salicaria, in the Lythraceae. The Lysimachia loosestrifes, which are in the Primulaceae, are yellow as far as I’ve seen. Like Fletcher says.
November 25th, 2009 at 12:38 am
[… – blogs.law.harvard.edu is one interesting source of information on this subject,[… –
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