Taking the piss out of the gods

Let’s begin in ancient Greece. Around 6% of Modern English is of direct Greek descent, with its influence mostly concerning the portion of our vocabulary relating to academics, politics, science and religion. There are obvious candidates, like democracy (demos = people, kratia = power), marathon (a town in Greece) and telephone (tele = far, phone = voice), but there are thousands of words of less obvious Greek origin that we use every day. The Greek myths alone have scattered their influence over the modern English language in places we take for granted all the time. Herculean efforts, titanic struggles, midas touches, achilles heels, oedipus complexes, pandora’s boxes, great odysseys, the list goes on.

Take Uranus, for example. One of the early gods in the Greek theogony and the god of the Heavens, Uranus is known to us as the seventh planet from our sun. The word has entertained children the world over for generations because any euphemism for a person’s behind is worthy of a few puerile giggles, but it is — I promise — more interesting than that. It still exists in Modern Greek as ουρανός, pronounced Ooranos, meaning sky, and although this is mostly familiar to English speakers via the planet* it finds form elsewhere in the language too.

In Greek creation myths, Uranus’s furious son Kronos cut off his father’s balls and tossed them into the ocean — cursed and forever destined to wreak havoc on humanity which is why the highly radioactive uranium is named so aptly.

And to reference the title of this post: the name Uranus comes from an even older word meaning to rain (remember Uranus was the god of the sky, hence this connection). Rain is a phenomenon caused by droplets of water forming in the sky and falling to earth. At some point someone drew parallels between rain and the exit mechanism of liquid from our bladders, and a lexical relative of Uranus found its way into the word urinating as well. This gives us urine, urology, urea, urologist, etc, etc.

But it isn’t just wholesale words we’ve inherited from the Greek myths — we see their influence far less directly too. The word clue comes from an older Germanic word clew which meant ‘a ball of thread’. The Greek hero Theseus entered a labyrinth on Crete to kill the Minotaur, taking with him a ball of thread to help him find his way back out. The thread offered Theseus the guidance he’d need, so the word clew started to be used in this context, and ultimately the word clue with its modern meaning was born.

* Comically, the planet itself narrowly avoided being christened George** by the German astronomer William Herschel who discovered it. Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, George, Neptune doesn’t quite have the same ring to it does it?

** Technically Herschel wanted to call it Georgium Sidus [George’s Star], which would have been undesirable given its planetary, not stellar, status; not to mention that ‘George’ was in reference to the then king of England which did not fit with the more mystical godly names given to the other planets