Welcome to my word study. If you already know that onychophagy is the medical term for ‘biting your fingernails’ and know too that a piscivore is a fish that eats other fish,’ that such a fish is indeed ichthyophagous, then you probably have no need to peruse this little essay, as you sit nibbling your morning toast, brought to table by a servant on a silver salver in a British toast rack. Did you know that the British deliberately invented an open toast rack so that the toasted slice of bread would always be stone cold by the time one came to apply the jam or Marmite?

By the way, both open toast racks and Marmite itself, a revolting yeast-based savoury spread, are apt examples of the sado-masochism involved in much British food. Writer Bill Bryson, in Notes from a Small Island writes: “There are certain things that you have to be British, or at least older than me, or possibly both, to appreciate: skiffle music, salt-cellars with a single hole, [and] Marmite (an edible yeast extract with the visual properties of an industrial lubricant).”

Australia and New Zealand have the similarly revolting Vegemite, compounded of left-over brewer’s yeast debris and sundry bits of kitchen detritus. But many of us are reformed detritivores. The word Vegemite itself is so close to the word sodomite that its use as a food name verges upon obscenity and suggests untoward employments of celery sticks for which one can be arrested in Alabama.

 

Now, to today’s business of the Latin and Greek roots, -vore and -phag- , both of which refer to eating and both of which have produced some English scientific words.

 

-VORE

from Latin vorare ‘to eat like an animal’

 

A carnivore eats meat. It is carnivorous.

A herbivore eats plants. It is herbivorous.

An insectivore eats insects. It is insectivorous.

An omnivore eats everything. It is omnivorous.

A planktivore eats plankton. It is planktivorous.

 

Some bats are frugivorous. They eat fruit.

A wee cutie nibbles by night. Caught in the zoologist’s flash is a Jamaican fruit-eating bat, scientific name: Artibeus jamaicensis.

 

Mice are granivorous. They eat grains.

Some insects are graminivorous. They eat grasses.

Other insects may filch from bees and be nectarivorous.

Still other insects are phytosuccivorous. They feed on the sap of plants. One recondite favourite of mine is aphidivorous ‘devouring aphids.’ Larvivorous is neat too, meaning ‘feeding on larvae,’ said of certain fishes.

 

“Aroint Thee, Low-born Merdivore!”

A good silly one is merdivorous ‘eating shit’, obscure synonym for the more usual zoological term coprophagous ‘eating dung.’ I think it would be fitting to repel some cringing lickspittle with this command:

“Begone, base merdivore!” Or “Get out, you merdivorous pipsqueak!”

The second element of these compounds descends from a Latin verb, voro, vorare, voravi, voratum. On drab little word sites cobbled together by semiliterate dictionary-rifflers who have never read a paragraph of Latin in their lives, you will see vorare translated as “to eat.” No. It almost never meant that in Latin. The simple descriptive Latin verb edere means ‘to eat’ and is cognate with the English verb eat.

 Vorare is a pejorative verb in Latin, a verb of insult. Its prime meaning to Latin-speaking Romans was ‘to eat like an animal, to devour greedily, to swallow quickly.’ One of its compounds de-vorare gives us the English verb devour. Here the prefix de- strengthens and exaggerates the root meaning of the verb, so that devorare means ‘to eat excessively or thoroughly like an animal.’

The chief adjective of vorare in Latin was vorax ‘ravenous, insatiable, wolfing down food, voracious.’ The Romans loved the word. In lists of dogs’ names that have come down to us, Vorax as the given name of a Roman dog is prominent. Vorax has been found on a mosaic tile under the image of a gladiator. So Vorax was the gladiatorial naming equivalent of a wrestling name like The Crusher. Maybe he was a monster who bit off the ears of Christians. One can only hope.

 

-Phag, Phago-, Phagy

from Greek phagos Greek ‘eater, eating’ and phagein ‘to eat’ and phagia ‘eating’

 

Sarcophagus = sarx, sarkos Greek ‘flesh’ + phagos ‘eater’

The first sarcophagus was possibly a limestone coffin said to assist in the disintegration of a human corpse and so employed in making coffins. Later, the word sarcophagus names any ornate coffin built of stone or rare wood and decorated with the usual clichés of funerary mopery such as weeping angels hiding their teeny heads beneath moistened winglets or volant putti awing over the deceased person bearing banners printed with messages of perhaps false hope like “Nigel hath joined the Choir Celestial.”

 

Sarcophagus with the Triumph of Dionysus and the Four Seasons. Roman, Late Imperial, ca. A.D. 260-270. Known as the Badminton Sarcophagus, because it was once displayed at Badminton Hall, the country seat of the Dukes of Beaufort. The sarcophagus sits on four black marble balls and a plinth that was designed by William Kent, the Palladian architect, in the early seventeen-hundreds; the plinth bears the legend “Probably Found in Rome.” Purchase, Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, 1955. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art.

 

Esophagus = oisophagos an anatomical name coined by the ancient Greeks from oiso- Greek, meaning not known + phagos ‘eater’

The esophagus is the muscular gullet tube, about nine inches long in an adult, that connects the pharynx to the stomach. Peristaltic contractions of encircling muscles pass food through the esophagus.

 

Phagocyte = phagos Greek ‘eater’ + kytos Greek ‘cell’

A phagocyte is a scavenger cell that ingests foreign cells, debris and disease microorganisms. Some phagocytes are fixed in liver, spleen, and bone marrow. Others, such as leucocytes, circulate in the blood. They play a significant defensive role in immune reactions.

 

Anthropophagi are cannibals, from anthropos Greek ‘man’ + phagos ‘eating’

Today the word is frequently used humorously to convey a pseudoscientific pomposity to what is more usually called cannibalism.

 

Coprophagy is the literal eating of shit.

From kopros Greek ‘dung, shit’ + phagia ‘eating’

Dung-beetles are coprophagous, dining on excrement with far too great an enthusiasm.

 

Hippophagy is eating horse meat.

From hippos Greek ‘horse’ + phagia ‘eating’

 The practice of consuming horseflesh is encountered in North America rarely but does arise at the cheaper hamburger stands. Among ancient wandering peoples of the Asian steppes and invaders of Europe hippophagism served a survival need.

 

Onychophagy is the biting and sometimes eating of one’s fingernails.

From onychos Greek ‘fingernail’ + phagia ‘eating’

The word appears frequently in medical literature describing symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorders and in textbooks of the dietary sciences.

 

Necrophagy is eating corpses.

From nekros Greek ‘dead’ + phagia ‘eating’

Earthly creatures other than ghouls do eat the dead bodies of their fellow critters.

 

Theophagy is eating your god. It is by no means as yucky as one might surmise upon first encountrering the word or the practice.

From theos Greek ‘god’ + phagia ‘eating’

Christians wax theophagous during Holy Communion, as they nibble piously on the dainty bread wafers of the Eucharist miraculously transubstantiated into the very flesh of Christ. That is Roman Catholic dogma. Some of the vegetarian protestant sects found this quite dégoutant. So they came up with consubstantiation, wherein the bread and wine don’t actually undergo a transformative abracadabera and turn into Jesus fingers and saviour plasma. Instead, a more seemly metamorphosis ensues, in which the molecules of Wonder Bread and Thunderbird wine are said to “coexist” with the Christly bits. So much more tasteful, I always think.

 

Placentophagy is the eating of a placenta by a mother after giving birth. Certain devotees of natural childbirth believe that placentophagy can be a natural cure for postnatal depression. The medical evidence of this is yet to be published in peer-reviewed journals.

 

Pass the Stick, Please, I'm an Habitual Artophagist

Exceedingly rare is the adjective artophagous ‘eating bread.’ (artos, Greek ‘bread)

 

Lotophagoi or Lotus-Eaters

The Lotophagi or lotophagoi were the lotus-eaters of Greek myth, a colony of persons who ate lotus fruit, believed to be an early soporific or psychedelic. Odysseus tells of his encounter with the Lotus-eaters in Homer’s Odyssey. The Greeks land on their island to draw fresh water. His men are fed lotus fruits by the locals and descend into a dreamy state that renders them torpid as beached carps. They wish to loll on the beach and do nothing but eat more lotus fruits.

 

18th-century French engraving depicting Ulysses dragging his men by their hair

back to the ship, away from Lotus-eating lethargy, as Homer describes it in the Odyssey.

 

The addictive narcotic plant involved is possibly an African water-lily whose botanical name is Nymphaea caerulea also known as the Blue Lotus, from whose fruits and flowers a powerful soporific has been distilled. This water-lily is very common in ancient Egyptian wall paintings which suggest it may have been used in religious ceremonies to induce a state of blissful torpor. Nowadays we have born-again evangelists on television to perform a similar function.

 

Check out my column on GEOPHAGY ‘eating dirt or soil.’

 

© 2008 William Gordon Casselman