A ninth-grade English teacher in Canfield, Ohio, says that when her class reached the climactic scene in The Odyssey where Odysseus bends his mighty bow and kills his wife’s suitors, a student wondered whether the correct phrase is shoot a bow or shoot an arrow. The latter is far more common. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Shoot a Bow vs. Shoot an Arrow”
Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi, this is Val from Canfield, Ohio. Hi, Val. Welcome to the show.
Hi, Val. What’s up? So I am a teacher. I teach ninth grade. And recently when my kids were finishing up a test for the Odyssey, a couple of my students had some questions about how to express the phrase to shoot a bow or to shoot an arrow. And I didn’t really have a great answer for them because, you know, they both kind of sound right to me. So I thought I’d call in and ask you guys. They were not sure whether to say that Odysseus was shooting a bow or shooting an arrow at the end. Is that right?
We can tell you that the expression shoot an arrow is far, far more common in English than shoot a bow. I could see particularly in that context where you might think twice about that because that’s the big climactic scene in the Odyssey, right?
Yeah.
Yeah. What goes on there?
So Odysseus, he and the suitors, they have to string his bow. And the second part of it is he has to shoot an arrow through 12 axe handles, axe heads, depending on the translation.
Right.
And so, you know, they get, you know, like there’s part one and part two of the test. So I didn’t really know what to tell them. It’s like, are we focusing on the bow or the arrow? I don’t know.
Yeah, it’s interesting to me at the end of the Odyssey, it seems to me that so much of the focus is on the bow itself because Odysseus is so mighty that he’s the one guy who can string it like an expert musician and pull it back and actually fire those arrows. It talks about him plucking the string of the bow and what, sounding like a swallow’s cry or something. It’s just, there’s a whole lot of emphasis there on the bow itself.
And so that’s the only reason why I would think about using the expression shoot a bow. But actually far and away what you’re going to find more commonly in ordinary circumstances is shoot an arrow.
Okay. Awesome. I will tell them that.
Yeah, yeah. So I wouldn’t take off points if somebody said shoot a bow. And it’s definitely context dependent because those phrases don’t just float alone on a blank page. They’re surrounded by other words and actions.
Right, right.
There’s a danger of analyzing that way too closely.
So Val, give our best to your students.
I will.
And they’re definitely going to get some bonus points for this question.
Well, they are.
Well, great.
Thank you, Val.
Really appreciate it.
Thanks so much.
Take care.
Bye.
Okay.
Bye-bye.
Email words@waywordradio.org.
