From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Wed Dec 20 1995 - 15:00:13 EST
At 12:24 PM 12/20/95, James D. Ernest wrote:
>On Wed, 20 Dec 1995, Mark O'Brien wrote:
>
>>
>> Only one question remains... what *is* the Greek word for "squirrel"?
>>
>Not so fast! This was a Reader Response anecdote: the reader
>must either look it up or overcome the inevitable compulsive
>urge to do so. And don't bother looking in the Bible; you'll
>have to do your squirrel-hunting in the Attic. (Or, if you wimp
>out, just try your Merriam-Webster s.v. squirrel).
Well, I think anyone could have found this out readily, and one didn't even
need to go to Merriam-Webster. The surprising thing is that "squirrel" is
derived from the Greek in the first place! SKI/OUROS: "shadow-tail,"
Latinized as "Sciurus." And the word probably is pretty old, though I
haven't tried to do a word-search on TLG for it. Pliny the Elder refers to
it in the _Natural History_, and then Oppian in the 2d c. A.D. mentions it
in his work on Hunting.
I was expecting something more exotic like the German "Eichkatze"
(oak-cat). But "shadow-tail" or perhaps "mirage-tail" is a pretty neat
description, methinks.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University
One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO, USA 63130
(314) 935-4018
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cwc@oui.com
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Sat Apr 20 2002 - 15:37:35 EDT