Haggard Hawks 11

Moles, colds, and Zenobia

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YOUR NAME IS MUD

 

This week, the most popular HH tweet by far was the fact that moles were once known as muddywants. If we’ve said it once before, we’ve said it a thousand times: by crikey, the internet loves animal pictures. 

 

Want is actually the oldest recorded name for the mole in the English language, having been unearthed in a Latin/Anglo-Saxon glossary dating from as far back as the mid 700s; mole, in comparison, was borrowed into English sometime around the turn of the fifteenth century. 

 

In this sense, want derives from the same root as the verbs wend (meaning “to turn” or “to change course”) and warp (meaning “to bend” or “to distort”). That literally makes a muddywant something along the lines of an “earth-turner” or “earth-mover”—which, as we talked about over on the HH blog last year, is also essentially the meaning of mouldwarp, another old name for the mole that dates from the late 1300s. 

 

Then of course you find out that moles were once also known as “field tortoises” (a name taken from the French tortue de garrigue) and you realise that they officially have ALL THE BEST NAMES. 

 

Elsewhere this week we found out that:

 

  • if you’re constantly putting things off until tomorrow, you’re a tomorrower
  • the downplaying of your achievements—the opposite of megalomania—has a name...
  • ...as does the “I know you are, but what am I?” line of defence 
  • a runway hasn’t always been a runway
  • and originally there wasn’t anything funny about LOL

NEW ON THE BLOG

PERISCIAN

 

The word periscian cropped up on our Twitter feed recently, defined simply as “someone who lives in a polar region”. And, as is often the case with unassuming words like this one, scratch beneath the surface and there’s a great etymological tale to tell.

 

Periscian was coined by the Ancient Greek philosopher and geographer Posidonius from the Greek roots peri, meaning “around” or “encircling”, and skia, meaning “shadow”. That peri is the same peri– that crops up in words like perimeter, periscope, and periphrasis (“longwinded, roundabout speech”), and also turns up in period (which meant “circuit” or “cycle” in Ancient Greek), Pericles (whose name literally meant “famous everywhere”), and peristalsis, the wave-like muscular movement that pushes food through the digestive system (and which essentially means “contracting” or “constricting around”). 

 

Skia meanwhile crops up in a handful of albeit fairly obscure English words like sciatherics, “the science of using shadows to tell the time”, and skiamachy, a formal name for shadow-boxing or, more figuratively, a sham fight or angry dispute. It’s also found in the adjective sciapodous, meaning “having large feet”—but that’s a word that deserves its own blogpost at a later date...

 

But how does a word meaning something like “casting a shadow all around” come to refer to someone who lives at the Poles? Well, as you might have already worked out, it’s all to do with geography. 

 

One of the subjects that most interested Posidonius was the size and arrangement of the continents. Writing in the second century BC, he came up with a method of dividing all the land on the surface of the Earth into three latitudinal bands or zones that he called the Amphiscian, the Heteroscian and the Periscian—each name referring to the shape and position of the shadows of the people who lived in each one. 

 

This “Posidonian” system of dividing the Earth was then picked up and expanded on by later scholars and geographers, including Cicero, Plutarch and Strabo, the latter of which considered Posidonius “the most learned of all philosophers of my time”. As he explained: 

 

Amphiscians are all those who at midday have their shadows sometimes projecting this way, to the north ... [and] sometimes in the opposite direction when the Sun changes round to the opposite way ... This happens only to those who live between the tropics. 

Heteroscians, on the other hand, are either all those whose shadow falls to the north, like us, or all those whose shadow falls to the south, like the inhabitants of the southern temperate zone.

Strabo, Geography (c. 7 BC)

 

That left the Periscians, who dwelt at extreme latitudes where uninterrupted sunlight during the summer months caused their shadows to “traverse in a circle” around them.

 

So while the Amphiscians literally had “both-way shadows”, and the Heteroscians had “same-way shadows”, the Periscians were wholly encircled by their shadows, like the spike on a sundial:

 

PERISCII are the inhabitants of the two Frozen Zones, or those who live within the compass of the Arctick and Antarctick Circles; for as the Sun never goes down to them once he is up, but always round about, so do their Shadows. Whence the Name. 

John Harris, Lexicon Technicum: A Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (1704)

 

He may have invented the term, but Posidonius came to a somewhat misguided conclusion about the Periscians: he didn’t believe they existed. In a later discussion of the size of the lands of the Earth (that only survives in a fragment today) he wrote: 

 

Periscians are of no importance in relation to geography, for these parts are uninhabitable because of the cold ... So there is no need to worry about the size of this uninhabited land.

 

And that really is cold. 

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QUEEN ZEE

 

To mark International Women’s Day on Thursday, we tweeted the word Zenobia—the name of a third-century queen of Palmyra that can be used allusively to describe any powerful, determined, irrepressible woman. 

 

Palmyra now stands in modern-day Syria (and as such has recently been making headlines for all the wrong reasons), but in Zenobia’s time it was a grand city and province of the eastern Roman Empire. Her husband, Odaenathus, was the founder king of the Palmyrene Kingdom, and through a series of successful conflicts essentially gained control of a Roman splinter state occupying an impressive stretch of the Middle East between the Black, Red and Mediterranean Seas.

 

All that came to an abrupt end in 267 when Odaenathus was assassinated along with his first-born son and heir, Hairan I. Next in line to the throne was the couple’s second son, Vaballathus, but he was just 10 years old and so unable to rule effectively. Faced with a vacuum of power that threathened to spark the collapse of the kingdom, Zenobia gamely took de facto control of Palmyra—and soon proved an exceptionally capable leader. 

 

Educated, intelligent and benevolent, she made her court a seat of learning, and willingly accommodated all the differing faiths and cultures of those who came under her power. Over the years that followed, she greatly extended the reach of her kingdom, pushing further into Arabia and Asia Minor, taking control of Egypt and the Nile corridor, and establishing a vast Palmyrene Empire. As empress, she resisted the might of Rome and took advantage of crises in the western Roman Empire to proclaim Palmyra independent of the Roman Emperor Aurelian in 271. At its peak, Zenobia’s Palmyreme Empire stretched from Ankara in the north to modern-day Aswan, in central Egypt, and Medina, on the west coast of Saudi Arabia, in the south.

 

But alas, it wasn’t to last. In 272, Aurelian’s Roman army headed east and defeated Zenobia’s forces at Antioch. Palmyra was besieged, and Zenobia and Vaballathus were captured before they could escape. Their fates are unknown, though much debated; in their absence Palmyra eventually fell, and by 273 was once more under Roman control. 

 

Zenobia’s place in history was nevertheless assured. She had taken control of a vast kingdom at a critical point in its history (and at a time when it all but unheard of for a woman to wield such power) and not only proved herself to be an astonishingly effective leader, but succeeded in extending her empire’s range and influence to its greatest ever extent.

 

And, quite rightly, she’s remembered in the dictionary as a fitting byword for any similarly powerful, irrepressible woman. 

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LIKE IT OR LUMP IT

 

The word lumpenintelligentsia popped up on our Twitter feed last weekend, defined as “intelligent people who contribute little of any use to society.”  

 

As some of you quite rightly pointed out at the time, the word lumpenintelligentsia is based on Karl Marx’s notion of the lumpenproletariat—a term he coined in 1850 to refer to what the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “the lowest and most degraded section of the proletariat”, or “the ‘down and outs’ who make no contribution to the workers’ cause.”

 

Lumpenintelligentsia was coined in 1936, by a Marxist scholar and founder member of both the British Socialist Party and the British Communist Party named Thomas A Jackson. In Jackson’s words, the lumpenintelligentsia “spend their days either in posing as more Marxist than Marx, more Leninist than Lenin, and more proletarian than the proletariat; or, alternatively, in nattering at all three in the name of whatever-it-is which is the ‘Very Latest’!” 

 

And that word lumpen that shows up in both? It’s the German word for “rags”. 

TEMPLATE No. 11

 

And finally, a puzzle just for our subscribers: only one English dictionary word (that we could find) fits each of the templates below. What are they? 

 

_ _ _KGR_ _ _ _

_ _ _KGA_ _ _ _

_ _ _ _KGU_ _ _

 

 

[Answer to last week’s puzzle: KEYNOTE, CHIVALROUS, UNSOPHISTICATED]

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