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Word & Phrase Origins Associated with the Olympic Games

 

Stadium

Our common word for a sports arena arose from one of the mythical origins of the ancient Olympic Games. The great superhero of Greek mythology was Heracles. We know him better by his Roman name, Hercules. After finishing his arduous 12 Labours of Hercules, it is said that Hercules zipped off to Elis and there constructed the first Olympic stadium and all the other buildings. When he began to lay out just how large this first sports arena would be, Herc paced out 400 big steps and dubbed that distance a στάδιον Greek ‘a stage.’ In Latin it was stadium. A Greek stadion was a unit of measurement ever afterward, consisting of 400 strides. The circumference of a modern running track is 400 meters, one lap of a running course. Today one stadium equals 400 meters. As an ancient Greek and Roman measure of length, the stadion was usually 600 feet, or one-eighth of a Roman mile.

a putative reconstruction of the shrines at the original Olympic site

 

Citius, Altius, Fortius

The motto of the Olympic Games consists of three comparative Latin adjectives which mean ‘swifter, higher, stronger.’

 

Pentathlon

According to Greek legend, the first Olympic Games featured only one sport, one footrace on one day. The first Olympic winner was a lowly but speedy cook, a man named Koroibos of Elis.

Later it is said the psychotically competitive Spartans joined the Olympics and they added the pentathlon.

Pentathlon = pente Greek ‘five’ + athlon Greek ‘contest’

The five contests of the pentathlon are running, jumping, spear throwing (the javelin), discus throwing and wrestling. Boxing and chariot racing were among later ancient additions to the Olympic roster.

On an ancient Greek red-figure vase, an instructor, supervising wrestlers practicing for the pentathlon, taps the wrestling students with a long stick to indicate better places to grab an opponent.

 

Some Other Pente - Words

Pentateuch - the first five books of the Old Testament are so called from pente Greek ‘five’ + teuchos Hellenistic Greek ‘book’

The Pentagon is the five-sided building that houses the headquarters of the United States Department of Defense. pente + gonia Greek ‘angle, corner’

 

Shakespeare wrote most of his plays in iambic pentameter lines. Each line contains five metrical feet, i.e.:

“He jests / at scars / that nev / er felt / a wound.”

An iambus is a metrical foot with two beats, usually short-long, as in the line above from Romeo & Juliet where Romeo scolds Mercutio.

 

A pentatonic scale in music has only five tones.

Pentecost is the 5oth day after Passover. From Greek pentekoste hemera 'fiftieth day'

The person reading this column is probably a pentadactyl. You have five fingers on each hand and five toes on each foot. Unless you've been dancing with Stephen Harper.

pente + daktylos Greek ‘finger, toe’

Your mother-in-law, on the other hand, is a pterodactyl. But you'll have to look that one up, if need be.

 

A Samaritan Pentateuch in a scroll

 

Athlete

athletes Greek ‘contender’ from the Greek verb athlein ‘to compete for a prize’ from Greek noun athlon ‘prize.’

The Indo-European cognates of this athlon root include Norse veth ‘bail money’, Gothic wadi ‘security deposit’, Old High German wetti ‘pledge’ and even modern British slang wed from Old English wedd ‘a pledged thing given as a security deposit.’ These cognates suggest that entrance to the original Greek contest may have involved some such deposit.

Athlete as a word stems from the Olympic Games. The Greek word athletes referred specifically to any entrant who contested in the Games. English borrowed it directly from its Latin form, athleta. The word in Greek referred only to a competitor in the physical contests like leaping and running. These ancient public games also included poetry contests and musical competitions.

 

Discus

Latin from Greek diskos ‘quoit, platter’ simplified from a probable earlier and tongue-knotting form like *dīkskos, from the Greek verb dikeîn ‘to throw.’ The Greek verbal root is Proto-Indo-European whose zero grade is *dik- and *deik-‘ to show, to direct, to throw.’ One of the Greek past tenses, the aorist, shows edikon ‘I threw.’ Some etymologists think diskos was a word borrowed into Greek from an earlier Mediterranean language, but that early Greek folk etymology associated the word with that past tense, edikon ‘I threw.’

The ancient Greek diskos was a bronze disc weighing two to six kilograms. Tossing the discus was part of the pentathlon.

Word mavens should investigate some of the common English words that derive from the Latin reflex, discus. These words include disk, computer disc, desk, dish and dais!

 

Pankration

I thought we ought to toss in one contest banned from the modern Olympics. The ancient Greek poet Xenophanes referred to the pankration as “that latest and horrible sport . . . of all holds.”

pankration (pan ‘all’ + kratos Greek ‘bodily strength’ or ‘mastery’)

The pankration was like an ancient Greek version of Thai kick boxing, a vicious fight that combined wrestling and boxing, but also permitted the contestants to punch, to kick in the stomach, to rip hair off a scalp. The only prohibited manoeuvre was gouging out your opponent’s eyeballs with your fingernails. Biting off his nose or ears was also frowned upon and might earn the misbehaving contestant a wagging finger of disapproval from the referee.

 

Mens Sana in Corpore Sano

The Latin tag means ‘a healthy mind in a healthy body.’

Poseidon was the buff Greek god of the sea, of earthquakes and of storms, and the protecting patron deity of fishermen. Cast in bronze about 460 BCE, the statue shown above resides at The National Archaeological Museum in Athens. This masterpiece of the Severe Style of classical Greek sculpture was found in 1928, fittingly, by fishermen in their nets off the coast of Cape Artemision in North Euboea. In the god’s raised right hand was a now lost trident, the three-pronged fishing spear of antiquity, which he was preparing to throw. Trident = tridens, tridentem (accusative of the adjective to show the stem)= tri- Latin ‘three’ + dens, dentis (genitive of the noun to show the stem) Latin ‘tooth.’

As the chief sea god, Poseidon’s name appears to be appropriately wet in origin, probably derived from one of the Greek reflexes of an Indo-European ‘water’ root whose zero grade is *po- ‘drink, water’. Poseidon belongs with Greek words like pontos ‘the open sea,’ potos ‘drinking,’ potamos ‘river’ (as in the word hippopotamus literally ‘river horse’). The Latin reflex is potare ‘to drink’ which gives English words like potable and potion. Italy’s principal river, the Po River (Latin Padus) is perhaps a pre-Latin drop of hydronymy of similar origin.

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The “mens sana”quotation is from ancient Rome’s best satirical poet, Juvenal.

The calm thunder and rolling majesty of Juvenal’s Latin is one of the splendors of Roman poetry — even if here Juvenal was paraphrasing an earlier pre-Socratic Greek philosopher named Thales. Here is the passage, first in Latin, then in my English translation, from Satire 10, lines 356-57:

orandum est ut sit mens sana in corpore sano.

fortem posce animum mortis terrore carentem. . .

 

One ought to pray for a healthy mind in a healthy body.

Ask (the gods) for a plucky soul not afraid of bothersome death . . .

 

In the tenth Satire, Juvenal prods Romans not to pray for outlandish requests at which the gods will snicker up their toga sleeves. Instead, says Juvenal, pray common-sense prayers for good health.

Two Greeks kneel at an altar, preparing to sacrifice a wee piggywig to some imposter god, from a tondo on an ancient Greek red-figure bowl. As usual with sacrifices by humans, there will be one drop of blood for the god and major bacon for the worshippers.

 

 

copyright © 2008 William Gordon Casselman

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

World Festival of Lousy Translations Today's Entry - - strictly from Hungary

Gee, thanks, because, you know, last year, our whole family,

well, we totally missed The World Day of Eggs in Hungary.

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