Boustrophedonic writing goes from right to left, then left to right, then right to left again. This term derives from Greek word bous, meaning “ox,” also found in bucolic and bulimia (literally, ox hunger) and strophe, meaning turn, like the downward turn that is a catastrophe. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Boustrophedon”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
Leonardo da Vinci was a creative genius, of course, but he also had a really ingenious way of writing.
You know about this, right, Grant?
Yeah, well, he wrote mirror image, right?
Right. He started at the right-hand side of the page and wrote toward the left.
And he slanted his letters in that direction, and each character was inked backward, right?
Yeah, if you put a mirror up to it, it would make perfect sense to the rest of us.
And nobody knows why he did that for sure.
Some people think it was that he was trying to conceal what he was writing.
But I think more likely is the fact that he was left-handed.
And if you’re writing with ink across a page, you’re not going to smear the letters if you’re doing that.
That’s right.
Yeah, that’s the smudge, the telltale smudge on the left-hander’s arm, right?
Yes.
Yes.
It was probably also a good exercise for his brain.
But that reminds me of another of my favorite words, which is booster feeding.
Oh, yes.
Yes.
Am I remembering this correctly?
So you start on the upper left as usual and you write to the right.
But when you get to the end of the line, instead of going back to the start of the next line, you simply start at the end of the next line and move left.
So it’s a zigzag all the way down the page.
Left to right, right to left, left to right, and so forth.
Yeah.
Yeah, it’s like you’re mowing a lawn or like an ox plowing in the field.
Oh, are we hearing that in the word?
We are hearing the etymology of boostrophedon.
It comes from Greek words that mean ox turning because that kind of writing mimics the action of an ox pulling a plow.
How about that?
And what’s super cool is that there are examples of this kind of writing in antiquity from Crete and Italy and India and Northern Europe and even Easter Island.
And you see the Greek word for ox, bus, in a lot of other words.
You see it in bulimia, which literally means ox hunger.
You see it in bucolic, which describes the kind of place that you might see.
A pastoral scene with cows in the pasture.
Yeah.
And the strafidon has to do with turning, and you see that in catastrophe, which is literally a turning down, a turn of events that’s very bad.
So, bustrafidon and bustrafidonic.
And I wanted to share also that back when I used to write a word-of-the-day newsletter years and years and years ago, one of my subscribers sent me a ditty based on the word bustrafidonic.
Her name is Ilana Stern, and her ditty was,
You have planted a seed most demonic.
Now I yearn to be boostrophedonic.
But to turn like an ox is quite unorthodox,
And damn hard in this mode electronic.
How nice is that?
How many times do you see boostrophedonic in a ditty?
I bet we have listeners who would send us more.
Maybe, and they might also tell us how they write, because I know there are exceptional people out there who just don’t do it the normal way on purpose.
Ooh, ooh, I’d love to hear about that, too.
Tell us how you write, 877-929-9673, or send your stories of strange handwriting to words@waywordradio.org.
