Pelion Upon Ossa

Gene Holler, who lives just north of Asheville, North Carolina, wrote us to say,

I was reading Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman, and he used the phrase “Piling pelion upon Asa” with no further explanation. He evidently assumed his readers would get the illusion. He wanted an explanation for what “Pile Pileon on Assa” means, and it means to make an already difficult situation even more difficult by adding an extra task, and it’s an allusion to Greek mythology.

It involves two mountains in Greece called Pileon, P-E-L-I-O-N, and Assa, O-S-S-A, and there are various versions of this myth, but basically there were these two nine-year-old.

Giants who stood 40 feet tall, and they decided that they were going to declare war on the gods.

So they got this bright idea to get up to the heavens to fight the gods by piling Mount Asa on top of Mount Olympus and then Mount Pelion on top of everything so they could climb up there.

So the expression to pile Pelion on Asa is sort of the story of what happens when you have two out-of-control nine-year-old boys.

Yeah, when I saw that email, I had never heard that either, so I was delighted to look into that and learn that as well.

We’re always grateful when you send us down an interesting etymological rabbit hole, and you can do that by sending your emails to words@waywordradio.org.