Sinai Peninsula
==
Nimbus III

Labels: architecture, Egyptian, nimbus iii, sinai

In Monday's post I mentioned the asphodel, a flower which is said to bloom in abundance across the pastures of Elysium. The Elysium fields were a sort of Greek Valhalla, serving as an abode for dead heroes and similarly blessed folks. Figuratively, Elysium can be used to describe any place or state of ideal happiness (yet despite its namesake the Champs-Élysées always struck me as rather hellish).

The etymology of Elysium is up for debate (as Wikipedia notes the spelling Elysium is a Latinization of the Greek word Elysion). Depending on who you talk to it's either:

1) "...[A] mysterious name that evolved from a designation of a place or person struck by lightning, enelysion, enelysios."

2) "...[Elysion] may...derive from the Egyptian term ialu (older iaru), meaning "reeds," with specific reference to the "Reed fields" (Egyptian: sekhet iaru / ialu), a paradisiacal land of plenty where the dead hoped to spend eternity."

3) "Biblical scholars have suggested that Elysion may derive from Elisha, who was, according to Genesis, a son of Yawan (Iouan, forefather of the Ionians) and one of the ancestors of the Greeks. Elisha may be worshipped as a god by his earliest descendents."

IMHO, Theory #2 is rather dull. And although I immensely appreciate and admire the fact that the Greeks had a term for people or places struck by lightning (why don't we do that?) it's Theory #3 that I like the most. Why? Simple...Elisha. Not to be confused with Another Bad Creation's pop hit "Ayesha", Elisha was a bald-headed Hebrew prophet with a temper problem. After 42 children mocked Elisha's receding hairline he summoned two she-bears from the woods who proceeded to maul the kids to pieces (II Kings 2:23-24). Awesome!

Elysium [Wikipedia]

Labels: Egyptian, Greek, Hebrew, The Daily Hump

My cat thinks you're an asshole
Hump This is a (quasi-)weekly Friday feature where you, the WordHumper reader, choose which lucky word gets humped back to the stoneage (or at least to Proto-Indo-Europa). Today's word comes from RM in California who asks:

You already humped goat but what about cat? I think it must come from [the French] chat but where'd THAT come from? Not Latin, clearly.

It's a simple enough word and probably one of the first words most people learn to spell. The OED reports cat is traced as far back as records go for all modern European languages suggesting "extensive communication". Alas, it is because cat can be found in virtually all these languages over the past 2,000 years (the first recorded appearance of the word in Europe is the Latin catta, 1st c. CE) that it becomes practically impossible to pinpoint the word's origin.

That being said, cats have been kept by humans since ancient Egyptian times and most likely our modern word cat comes from this region (cf. Nubian kadis, Berber kadiska, both meaning "cat").

If you have a word you'd like humped please email it, along with your location, to wordhumper.

cat [Online Etymology Dictionay]

Labels: Berber, Egyptian, Hump This, Latin, Nubian