Many English words have their roots in Greek and Roman myth. Tantalize derives from the story of King Tantalus, condemned to stand forever in a pool that receded whenever he was thirsty, and beneath a bough of fruit that pulled away whenever he...
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...
The adjective stentorian, meaning “extremely loud,” comes from the name of brazen-voiced Stentor, a Greek herald in The Iliad, whose voice was said to be as powerful as that of 50 men. The noun and verb mentor come from The Odyssey. In that Greek...
The word amethyst looks mysterious, but it’s really a sober-minded term from ancient Greece. Greek amethystos literally means “not intoxicating,” from a- meaning “not” and methys, meaning “drunk,” a relative of English mead. The Greeks believed the...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski offers a classic deletion puzzle with a Greek twist. Each clue sentence hides a word that can lose the name of a Greek letter and become the answer suggested by the rest of the sentence. A sample clue is I piled my gear on the...
Jimmy and his high-school classmates wonder about the pronunciation of words like zooplankton, zoology, and zoological. The traditional pronunciation for many scientific terms that start with zoo- is to use a long o rather than an oo sound. The...