Snow Motto Has Ancient Source

Sometimes considered the motto of the United States Postal Service, even used to refer to the Pony Express rider shown above, this is in fact a translation of a line written in the fifth century BCE by Herodotus, the Greek writer known as “the father of history.” His master work was On the Persian Wars composed between 500 and 479 BCE. In this famous passage, Herodotus praises the stamina and persistence of horsed messengers in the service of Xerxes, king of Persia.

Now, for a moment of word study, we'll look at this passage in Classical Greek, and we shall not be daunted if a few letters differ from those in our Roman alphabet, shall we, class?

Next I'm putting in a rough transliteration so the Greekless visitor gets a feel for the sound of the Greek:

tous oute nifetos ouk ombros

ou kauma ou nux ergei

me ou katanusai ton prokeimenon

auto dromon ten tachisten.

In spite of the form in which I show the Greek, it is not poetry. It is Herodotus writing one of the first books on earth that may properly be called a history. Rather than scribble a mere list of what happened, Herodotus traveled to some of the Persian War locations and tried to write down the causes of human actions. We are going to examine a few of the Greek words in this passage and see if they are as strange and foreign to English as they at first appear to be.

Now here's a rough, literal, deliberately awkward, in-the-original-word-order translation of this passage of Greek prose.

For these [riders], not snowstorm, not thunder-shower, not heat, not night shall work to delay their imposed mail-route (dromon) nor their carrying it out as fast as possible.

A formulaic phrase very similar to the one in Herodotus appears in Homer’s Odyssey, probably written down three or four hundred years earlier. Even by the time of Homeric Greek this ‘nor snow now sleet nor dark of night’ phrase may have become a cliché. Homer, it is thought, throve during an age when the oral recitation of epic poetry, the earliest mode, began to share presentation with written epics. In Book Four of the Odyssey, at line 566 one of the Greek princes, Menelaos, receives a prophesy. Below is the relevant line in Homeric Greek followed by a translation of the surrounding passage.

And here is Samuel Butler’s wonderful translation of this passage from Book 4 of The Odyssey. I have emended Butler here and there.

“As for your own death, Menelaos, you shall not die in Argos, but the gods will take you to the Elysian fields at the end of the world. There fair-haired Rhadamanthus reigns, and men live easier than anywhere, for in Elysium there falls not rain, nor hail, nor snow, but the Ocean God breathes ever in a West wind that sings softly from the sea, and gives fresh life to humans all.”

Are Those Words All Greek to You?

Let's examine a few of the Greek words in those passages of Herodotus and Homer and see if they bear any relevance whatsoever to modern English.

The first bit of Herodotus is a flurry of Greek negative particles.

tous oute nifetos ouk ombros ou kauma ou nux ergei me ou katanusai...

Ou and ouk and me in boldface are the common negative particles in Greek, usually as here proclitic, but sometimes when the negative needs emphasis, the particles follow the word they make negative. The two Greek negatives ouk and me make no common appearance in English words with one great exception, namely, in the word Utopia.

Utopia is not an original Greek word. It was made up by the great English Renaissance politician, scholar, and religious thinker Sir Thomas More, the same More who had his head chopped off by King Henry VIII when he would not renounce his Roman Catholic religion for the convenience of that swinish British monarch. More took ou the Greek negative and topos Greek ‘place’ to make the name of an imaginary country outopia, shortened to Utopia ‘no place.’ American beatniks had a similar place they called “No-where’s-ville.” Thomas More published his satirical Utopia in 1516 CE.

Next is the ancient Greek word for blizzard or snowstorm, niphetos. There is a cream-white tulip called Tulipa ‘Niphetos’ and rose-fanciers may know a Victorian climbing tea rose that was named for its luscious white or offwhite colour, Niphetos ‘snowstorm.’

From ombros, the Greek word for rain or shower, we derive the name of a common modern instrument. The technical word for a rain-gauge is an ombrometer (ombro + meter, from Greek metron ‘measure’ or metres ‘person or thing that measures something.’) A synonym for rain-gauge uses the Latin word for rain and becomes pluviometer. Note how both are listed below in this commercial cutaway illustration for a German rain-gauge.

Dieses Ombrometer (Pluviometer) misst die Regenmenge auf 200 cm²,

für den Winterbetrieb gibt es eine optionale Heizung.

Bog plants are ombrotrophic. They depend on rain and atmospheric moisture. Trophe is one of the Greek words for food, feeding, or nourishment. Such plants and those in rain forests are ombrophilic; that is, they love wet, rainy conditions. Philos is a Greek adjective and noun referring to non-sexual love or liking or fondness for something. Philadelphia is the city of brotherly love. Adelphos is the Greek word for brother. Philodendron is a vine that loves to circle tree trunks almost as if the vine were in love with the tree. Dendron is the Greek word for tree.

From nux or nyx, nyktos, the Greek word for night, modern ophthalmology takes its technical term for night blindness, nyctalopia, ultimately through late Latin from these four Greek roots: Greek nyct-‘night’ + alaos ‘blind’ + ops ‘eye’+ ia common noun ending in Latin and Greek (sometimes-eia in Greek) indicating in medical nouns a pathological condition or disease. The word nyctalopia appears in print first in the writings of Isidore, a Spanish encyclopedist (560-636 CE) known for the details of Greek and Latin culture transmitted to the Middle Ages in his main work, the Etymologies.

Some of the other Greek words and their English derivatives in this famous passage you may investigate for yourself. But they include from the root in the Greek verb ergei ‘it works’ terms like energy, synergy, allergy, and ergonomic.

From dromos, the Greek word for racetrack, running course, riding trail, come words like hippodrome, syndrome, dromedary, and palindrome.

Finally from the last word in the passage, tachisten ‘fastest,’ a superlative form of the Greek adjective tachys ‘quick, speedy, swift, fast’ we get a number of interesting English words. A tachistoscope is an instrument used to measure how much we see of objects exposed to our view for the fastest amount of time. Skopein is a Greek verb meaning ‘to view,’ and is the source of the hundreds of English object names that end in -scope. Tele means ‘far away’ in Greek. So you can see why they called it a telescope. The tachometer in your car has the same root. When your heart rate speeds up and you experience tachycardia or quick-heartedness, that too is from tachys. You might have watched enough weather forecasts to know that an isobar joins areas of equal air pressure. Isos is a Greek adjective that means ‘equal.’ Baros means weight or pressure. Thus an isotach is a line on a weather chart that joins areas of equal wind speed.

Conclusion: Knowing a few Greek roots makes many technical terms in English utter child's play to learn and even to recognize on sight once you have learned a few hundred of the combining forms. For example, now that you have read this little word study, guess the meaning of this word:

ombrotachometer

Obviously this is an instrument that measures the speed of falling rain. Perhaps it does not yet lurk on the meteorologist's shelf. But when it does appear, its proper word is waiting.

© 2007 William Gordon Casselman

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post office motto:origin of phrase

USPS motto origin

snow motto of Post Office