The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language by Mark Forsyth Read Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Mark Forsyth
there. The Malays also repeat verbs to intensify them, so I really like would be rendered as I like like , or suka suka . We occasionally do this in English, when somebody says, ‘I’ve got to, got to see that film’. All of which means that the Malay for I love butterflies is:
Saya suka suka rama-rama rama-rama
In Italian, butterflies are called farfalle and there’s a kind of butterfly-shaped pasta named after them that you can buy in most supermarkets. Outside Italy, though, most people don’t realise that it’s butterfly pasta , and in America they ignore the Italian name entirely and call farfalle bowties , because a butterfly resembles a bow-tie, and in an emergency could probably serve as a substitute.
This is a point of dress not lost upon the Russians, who call a bow-tie a butterfly. And as a butterfly is, in Russian, a little lady, bowties, butterflies and girls are all called babochkas (like babushkas ).
In the bleak Norwegian winter there are no butterflies at all, so when they emerge from their chrysalises in the bleak Norwegian summer they are called summer-birds , or somerfogl .
In French they rather boringly just took the Latin papilio and called their butterflies papillons . But then, in a fit of inventiveness, they realised that the grand tents in which kings sat at tournaments and jousts were shaped like the wings of a butterfly, so they called them papillons , and we call them pavilions , which means that there’s a butterfly at one end of Lord’s Cricket Ground.
Why all these intricate and exquisite names? Nobody bothers with the humble fly (which does exactly what it says on the tin) or the beetle ( biter ) or the bee ( quiverer ), or the lousily-named louse. Butterflies hog all the attention of the word-makers.
Perhaps this is because in many quite distinct and unconnected cultures the butterfly is imagined to be a human soul that has shaken off this mortal coil of woes and now flutters happily through a gaily-coloured afterlife.
This was the belief of the Maoris, and of the Aztecs in whose mythology Itzpapalotl was the goddess of the Obsidian Butterfly: a soul encased in stone who could be freed only by another tongue-twisting god called Tezcatlipoca.
There also seems to have been a ghost of this belief among the ancient Greeks. The Greek for butterfly was psyche , and Psyche was the goddess of the soul. There’s a lovely allegorical poem about her called ‘Cupid and Psyche’, and she’s also the origin of the study of the soul : psychoanalysis .
Psychoanalysis and the Release of the Butterfly
The great thing about creating something is that you get to give it a name. Who would endure the expense and incontinence of babies, were it not for the fun of saddling another human with a moniker that you chose yourself?
With this in mind one can imagine Sigmund Freud sitting in his study in Vienna and considering Psyche, the Greek goddess of the soul and mystical butterfly. That’s what he was analysing (with the stress on the first two syllables), so he decided to call his new invention psychoanalysis. Analysis is Greek for release . So Freud’s new art would be, literally, the liberation of the butterfly . How pretty! Freud was probably so pleased with himself that he became lazy, for most of the other psychological terms are Jungian.
Carl Jung was Freud’s protégé. Then one day Carl had a dream that wasn’t about sex. He hesitated before telling Freud something quite that embarrassing. Confessing to a psychoanalyst that you’ve had an innocent dream is rather like confessing to your grandmother that you’ve had a dirty one. Freud was outraged. What sort of fruitcake, he demanded, has a dream that isn’t dirty? It was inconceivable. Freud decided that Jung had gone quite mad, that the dream really had been dirty, and that Jung was just being coy.
Jung insisted that his dream wasn’t about sex and that, in fact, it was about his grandparents being hidden in a cellar. So he
Saya suka suka rama-rama rama-rama
In Italian, butterflies are called farfalle and there’s a kind of butterfly-shaped pasta named after them that you can buy in most supermarkets. Outside Italy, though, most people don’t realise that it’s butterfly pasta , and in America they ignore the Italian name entirely and call farfalle bowties , because a butterfly resembles a bow-tie, and in an emergency could probably serve as a substitute.
This is a point of dress not lost upon the Russians, who call a bow-tie a butterfly. And as a butterfly is, in Russian, a little lady, bowties, butterflies and girls are all called babochkas (like babushkas ).
In the bleak Norwegian winter there are no butterflies at all, so when they emerge from their chrysalises in the bleak Norwegian summer they are called summer-birds , or somerfogl .
In French they rather boringly just took the Latin papilio and called their butterflies papillons . But then, in a fit of inventiveness, they realised that the grand tents in which kings sat at tournaments and jousts were shaped like the wings of a butterfly, so they called them papillons , and we call them pavilions , which means that there’s a butterfly at one end of Lord’s Cricket Ground.
Why all these intricate and exquisite names? Nobody bothers with the humble fly (which does exactly what it says on the tin) or the beetle ( biter ) or the bee ( quiverer ), or the lousily-named louse. Butterflies hog all the attention of the word-makers.
Perhaps this is because in many quite distinct and unconnected cultures the butterfly is imagined to be a human soul that has shaken off this mortal coil of woes and now flutters happily through a gaily-coloured afterlife.
This was the belief of the Maoris, and of the Aztecs in whose mythology Itzpapalotl was the goddess of the Obsidian Butterfly: a soul encased in stone who could be freed only by another tongue-twisting god called Tezcatlipoca.
There also seems to have been a ghost of this belief among the ancient Greeks. The Greek for butterfly was psyche , and Psyche was the goddess of the soul. There’s a lovely allegorical poem about her called ‘Cupid and Psyche’, and she’s also the origin of the study of the soul : psychoanalysis .
Psychoanalysis and the Release of the Butterfly
The great thing about creating something is that you get to give it a name. Who would endure the expense and incontinence of babies, were it not for the fun of saddling another human with a moniker that you chose yourself?
With this in mind one can imagine Sigmund Freud sitting in his study in Vienna and considering Psyche, the Greek goddess of the soul and mystical butterfly. That’s what he was analysing (with the stress on the first two syllables), so he decided to call his new invention psychoanalysis. Analysis is Greek for release . So Freud’s new art would be, literally, the liberation of the butterfly . How pretty! Freud was probably so pleased with himself that he became lazy, for most of the other psychological terms are Jungian.
Carl Jung was Freud’s protégé. Then one day Carl had a dream that wasn’t about sex. He hesitated before telling Freud something quite that embarrassing. Confessing to a psychoanalyst that you’ve had an innocent dream is rather like confessing to your grandmother that you’ve had a dirty one. Freud was outraged. What sort of fruitcake, he demanded, has a dream that isn’t dirty? It was inconceivable. Freud decided that Jung had gone quite mad, that the dream really had been dirty, and that Jung was just being coy.
Jung insisted that his dream wasn’t about sex and that, in fact, it was about his grandparents being hidden in a cellar. So he
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