Martha recommends Greek to Me: Adventures of the Comma Queen, a deeply personal, exuberant account of falling in love with both ancient and modern Greek by Mary Norris, former copy editor for The New Yorker. Norris shares several intriguing modern Greek terms, such as diaphani memvrani, or “cellophane,” which is cognate with English diaphanous membrane. Another is the modern Greek word for “newspaper,” which is ephemerida, a relative of the English word ephemeral, which literally means “lasting but for a day.” This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Recommended Book: Greek to Me”
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.
Even if you don’t know a word of Greek, you may be tempted to start learning that language after reading a book by Mary Norris called Greek to Me.
The subtitle is Adventures of the Comic Queen, and you may remember her earlier book called Between You and Me, which is about her adventures as a comic queen that is wielding a copyediting pencil at the New Yorker magazine for three decades.
Her book Greek to Me is about her passion for both ancient Greek and modern Greek.
And it’s a deeply personal love letter to the language and this exuberant account of falling in love with both the ancient and the modern version.
And she writes about making multiple trips as a solo traveler in Greece and around the Aegean.
And I know very little modern Greek at all, so I was especially excited to pick up some from this book.
For example, I didn’t know that the modern Greek word for plastic wrap is something like diaphani membrani, or this is so poetic.
Diaphanous membrane?
Yes.
Oh.
Yes.
Wrap your sandwich in that diaphanous membrane.
Oh, that’s very cool.
Yeah, diaphanous coming from Greek words that mean light shining through.
And the modern Greek word for newspaper is ephemera, which means…
Ephemeral something?
Yes.
Yes, it’s related to the English word ephemeral.
It means lasting but for a day.
Ooh.
Isn’t that pretty?
Yeah, it truly does.
Yeah, the modern Greek for day is hemera.
You know, people say kalimera.
Kalimera, good morning, yeah.
Yeah, but it’s related to ephemeral.
So if you have a fan or a potential fan of ancient or modern Greek on your holiday gift list, I would recommend Greek to Me by Mary Norris.
Outstanding.
It sounds wonderful.
I had a wonderful trip there years ago where I went there on an unexpected adventure where I gave some co-workers some money and said, me a ticket, don’t tell me when I’m leaving or where I’m going until the day of the trip, and gave them a month-long window, and they sent me to Greece.
Are you serious?
I did, yeah.
Wow.
I didn’t like Athens, but I love the islands.
So do you recommend that kind of a—
I absolutely would.
Absolutely would do that.
I mean, now with the family, it’s harder, but it was amazing.
Wow.
The things you find out when you talk about books.
Maybe we can recommend some more books later in the show.
We will recommend some more books later in the show.
We’d like to hear your books, the things that you think we should be reading, the things that we should tell everyone else that they should be reading, 877-929-9673.
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