On Some Greek Roots--I

Let's plunge into some words, and their relatives, that appeared in the Kids' Bees from 1996-99, with special attention to how the Greek or Latin roots "work." I begin with opsimath--a late learner. The Greek word for "late" (adv.) is opse which, when used in combination, becomes opsi. "Math," of course, has nothing to do necessarily with mathematics; it is derived from the Greek verb manthano (to learn). I think that we are all opsimaths in so many areas in life; so many things just don't "dawn" on us until we "wake up" later in life. But it is fortunate that for many of us there is a later life; there is time do learn all those things later that we wished we knew. You have to make the effort, however.

The more important Greek preposition/prefix standing behind opsi, so to speak, is opistho, which means "behind." There are dozens of words in English formed off this word. An opisthodomos, for example, is an apartment or vestibule at the rear of an ancient Greek temple, while an opisthosoma is the "back" part of the "body" of certain insects. We could go into quite some detail in explaining the OED definition of opisthosoma. I will only give two parts of it here, hoping that it will whet your further interest: (a) the abdomen of a chelicerate anthropod, as an arachnid; (b) the segmented posterior end of the body of a pogonophoran worm, bearing many setae." When you know that a chelicera is an anterior pair of appendages near the mouth of an arachnid (think spider and relatives), and you realize that this physical feature is eponymous, you enter into a great new world. Something pognonophoran "bears a beard." I am sure that those insects have hairlike features that reminded a botanist of a beard long, long ago. Well, this is enough on opistho and opsi, but it ushers us into very useful roots.

You don't only learn late in life. Sometimes you have a lot of knowledge. If you do, you might be a polymath. We really have lost the concept of a polymath today, but in antiquity a guy was even known for this characteristic: Varro the Polymath, a first century BCE Roman. There is even a scholar at the University of New Mexico, Prof. Joseph McAlhany, who is finishing a book on Varro. Varro had a very wide scope of interests, and was said to have written hundreds of books.

Night And Day

One of he words in the 1999 Bee was hemeralopia. This nicely combines three roots: hemera, meaning "day" and al, from "alaos," which means "blind" and ops, having to do with "seeing." Someone who has hemeralopia, then, suffers from "day-blindness." If you have diplopia, you see things "double" (oh, by the way, a diploma is just a paper that is "doubled" or folded). Back to blindness, however. You can be blind by day or by night or by day and night. I suppose if you fall into the last category you just are blind, though let's try to develop a word for it. One Greek word for "blind" is typhlos. We have about a dozen or so words in English formed off this root, but most of them seem to relate to various families of lizards (something typhlophthalmic --"blind eye" belongs to the Typhlophthalmi, a superfamily of lizards...) or other creatures. Yet, a typhlograph was a 19th/early 20th century apparatus for assiting the blind to write evenly; and typhlology is the scientific study of blindness.

I discovered, however, that the typhlon in ancient Greek was the caecum (spelled also cecum, and even coecum, so it will unfortuantely not be in Bees), which is also known as the "blind gut." The cecum is so called because it has only one opening and, therefore, is considered "blind" on the other side, I suppose. Nevertheless, we have typhlitis, which is the inflammation of the caecum (now called appendicitis), typhlectomy, the excision of the caecum, typhlopexy, the operation of fixing the caecum to the wall of the abdomen (pexy is derived from the Greek pexis, meaning a fixing or putting together. The Greek verb is pegnumi. No dictionary gives the etymology of our word "peg" by including pegnumi, but it was an interesting thought!), and typhlotomy, an incision into the caecum.

Back to Nights and Days

Well, we got sidetracked from our trip to night and day, and so let's return to them now. Hemeralopia, as we saw, is "day blindness." Its opposite number is nyctalopia or "night blindness." The OED goes through the history of how these terms became confused, so that nyctalopia at one time meant "the ability to see better at night" and thus, for a while, it became synonymous with hemeralopia, but I will use them as opposites. If we remember that alaos in Greek also means "blind" (in addition to typhlos), we will never be tempted to spell it "nycti" or "nycto."

This distinction is quite important because, of all the words that can be easily screwed up in spelling, those beginning with "nyct" and "quadr" seem to me the most problematic. Thus, we have various words relating to night-blindness, which are spelled nycta..., but then we have things like nycthemeron, which combines "night" and "day" and refers to a period of twenty-four hours. However, just to confuse us, the Unabridged spells allows either nychthemeron or nycthemeron. Shucks. Another word they can't use. But we have nyctemera and nycteris, which relate to various living creatures. The nycti prefix gives us nyctinasty, which is the tendency of leaves or other parts of a plant to take up different positions at differnt times in response to changes in light intensity or temperature. It is also known as nyctitropism.

Then we have a series of nyctos, such as nyctograph, which is a strange idea invented by Lewis Carroll, of Alice in Wonderland fame, which he at first called the typhlograph, but then changed to the nyctograph, to denote a way a person can record ideas at night in bed without fully waking up. Hm. Maybe we should develop this idea for most of our work. We then could sleep through it and still be productive. Why did Carroll do this? Because he derived so many insights from his hypnagogic imagery. As luck would have it, hypnagogic can also be spelled hypnogogic by the Unabridged. This is the state of falling asleep. The state of coming out of sleep is hypnopompic (no variant spelling). Are you getting the impression that spelling is less "science" than some kind of temporary agreement among people? Oh, by the way, the "fear of night," is nyctophobia.

The only "nyctu" that I know is nycturia, which is the problem of needing to arise in the night for urination; an issue that will increasingly become the problem of men as the population ages. But, nycturia is also known as nocturia, and that gets us to all the Latin-derived words for night-related things, such as noctambulation, which is either somnambulism or simply a stroll by night, and lots of other words.

Conclusion

But let's quit here, not having gotten very far at all. I will need another essay to explore these things further.

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