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lycée

Λύκειον · lykeion

the grove of Apollo Lykeios

Aristotle opened his school in a grove outside the eastern gate of Athens, sacred to Apollo the Wolf-God. The lycée you just finished carries that grove's address. For eleven years you attended a building named after a Greek god's nickname.

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gymnasium

γυμνάσιον · gymnasion

the place where one trained naked

The Greek gymnos means 'naked'. The gymnasion was a ground where young men trained their bodies with no clothes on, and the school grew up beside it because that is where the teachers gathered. Your gymnasium remembers a time when education began with a bare body on the sand.

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academy

Ἀκαδήμεια · akadēmeia

the grove of the hero Akademos

Plato taught in a grove dedicated to an old Athenian hero named Akademos. From there come the Academy of Sciences, the academic hour, your diploma. Plato's revenge for an executed teacher still stands on every certificate.

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school

σχολή · scholē

leisure, free time

The strangest word on this list. Scholē in Greek means leisure, time free from labour. School was born as free time given over to thinking, and the word that now means a bell and an obligation once meant freedom.

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pedagogue

παιδαγωγός · paidagōgos

the slave who walked a boy to school

In Athens the pedagogue was a slave. His job was to walk a boy to his teacher and back, and to mind his manners on the road. The word we now give to a master of education first meant a servant with keys and a stick.

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museum

μουσεῖον · mouseion

a house of the Muses

Aristotle's Lyceum had a mouseion – a shrine to the nine goddesses of art and memory. From it grew the great library of Alexandria, and from that grew the local museum in your town. A glass case of potsherds is, quite literally, a temple of the Muses.

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music

μουσική · mousikē

the art of the Muses

The same root as museum. Mousikē was everything the Muses governed: song, mode, the harmony of number. When you start a playlist you are calling nine goddesses by name without knowing it.

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mathematics

μάθημα · mathēma

that which is learned

Mathēma meant simply 'the thing learned' – any acquired knowledge. The Pythagoreans narrowed the word to knowledge of number and form, because they held it the one knowledge that does not age. For eleven school years you called 'mathematics' what a Greek would have called learning itself.

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mentor

Μέντωρ · Mentōr

a character in the Odyssey, Odysseus' friend

Mentor is an old friend of Odysseus; in his likeness Athena walks beside young Telemachus on the road. The name became a common noun only in 1699, when Fénelon published The Adventures of Telemachus, a bestseller all of Europe read. Your mentor at the internship holds a job title taken from a novel, and the novel took it from Homer.

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democracy

δημοκρατία · dēmokratia

the people's power (dēmos + kratos)

The word is built from two pieces: dēmos, the people, and kratos, force or grip. The Athenians coined it for something unheard of, a city where the final word is held by a crowd of assembled free men. You stand on this word every time you drop a ballot.

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ostracism

ὀστρακισμός · ostrakismos

judgement by potsherd (ostrakon)

Once a year the Athenians could exile their most dangerous politician for ten years. They voted by scratching a name onto a shard of broken pottery – the ostrakon. Democracy had a delete button twenty-five centuries before social media.

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idiot

ἰδιώτης · idiōtēs

a private person

A Greek who lived only for his own affairs and stayed away from the assembly was an idiōtēs – a private man, unschooled in the common business. The word was no insult then; it simply named someone shut inside his own house. Our modern 'idiot' is the verdict the polis passed on indifference.

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despot

δεσπότης · despotēs

master of the household

A despotēs is the master of a house, the man who owns the slaves under his roof. Tocqueville revived the word for 'soft despotism', a state that tends its citizens the way a careful master tends his household servants. Care you cannot refuse has a Greek name too.

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economics

οἰκονομία · oikonomia

the rules of the house

Oikos is the household and everyone living in it; nomos is law. For a Greek, 'economics' was the art of running a house so that it outlives you. The word the news now uses to frighten you began as care for one's own home – and the ownership lecture returns it to that sense.

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monopoly

μόνος + πωλεῖν · monos + pōlein

to be the only seller

Monos – alone, pōlein – to sell. Aristotle's Politics tells how Thales, the same man who predicted the eclipse, bought up every olive press in Miletus over the winter – and named his price in spring. A philosopher invented the monopoly to prove that wisdom can make money, it simply wants something else.

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hypothec / mortgage

ὑποθήκη · hypothēkē

that which is placed underneath

In Attica a debtor set a stone – a horos – on his pledged land, carved with the creditor's name. Hypothēkē is that 'underlay': a debt placed beneath the field itself. Solon opened his reforms by pulling those stones out and cancelling the debts – the word in your bank contract remembers history's first debt amnesty.

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numismatics

νόμισμα · nomisma

the sanctioned thing; what convention makes current

Nomisma comes from nomos – law, convention. Aristotle points at it directly: money exists by agreement, and when the agreement changes, a coin becomes a metal disc. The whole philosophy of money hides inside the etymology – a Greek heard it every time he paid.

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politics

πολιτικά · politika

the affairs of the polis

Ta politika means 'the things of the polis', the shared business of the city; it is also the title of Aristotle's book. A politēs is a citizen, a man of the city. When someone advises you to 'stay out of politics', in Greek the advice sounds odd: you are being told to stay out of your own affairs.

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autonomy

αὐτονομία · autonomia

living by one's own law (autos + nomos)

In Greek treaties an autonomos city lives under its own laws, with no foreign garrison inside the walls. Kant carried the word from the city to the person: an autonomous will gives itself its law and therefore answers for it. Every time you defend your autonomy, you are quoting the diplomatic language of the fifth century BCE.

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anarchy

ἀναρχία · anarchia

no ruler; a year without an archon (an + archē)

The Athenians named each year after its chief archon, the way we name years with numbers. The year of the Thirty Tyrants they refused to recognise, entering it in the lists with a single word – anarchia, 'no ruler'. The word that frightens people today once stood in the Athenian calendar as its own line: a year the city declined to count.

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logic

λογική · logikē

the art of the word-and-reason (logos)

Logos means, at once, word, account, reason, law. Logic is the craft of handling the word-and-thought rightly, and the same root ends the name of every discipline you study: bio-logy, psycho-logy, geo-logy. Whatever science you chose, you chose the Greek logos.

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irony

εἰρωνεία · eirōneia

feigned ignorance

Eirōneia is the pose of knowing less than you do. It was Socrates' signature move: to ask innocent questions until the other man tangled himself in his own wisdom. The word for any sentence with a false bottom began as the name of one philosophical trap.

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sarcasm

σαρκασμός · sarkasmos

the tearing of flesh (sarx)

Sarkazein in Greek means to tear flesh with the teeth, the way a dog rips its prey. That is what you do when you are sarcastic: you bite. The most polite form of cruelty carries a butcher's name.

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category

κατηγορία · katēgoria

an accusation, a charge laid

Aristotle borrowed a courtroom word. Katēgoria is an accusation, the charge you lay against a defendant. He reworked it into a way of laying properties against the world, and now you pick a category in an app without hearing that you are charging someone.

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energy

ἐνέργεια · energeia

being-at-work (en + ergon)

This word has an author. Aristotle forged energeia from en, 'in', and ergon, 'work', to name a thing that is acting rather than merely able to act. Every electricity bill is issued in a term one man invented in the fourth century BCE.

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metaphysics

τὰ μετὰ τὰ φυσικά · ta meta ta physika

the [books] placed after the Physics

The grandest accident in the history of thought. When his students arranged Aristotle's works, the books on the first principles of being were shelved right after the books on nature, the 'physics'. The name of the deepest science is really a shelving note: the thing that stands after the Physics.

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character

χαρακτήρ · charaktēr

an engraving stamp, a die

A charaktēr is the die that strikes a coin, and the mark it leaves. The Greeks named a person's temperament by that imprint, as if the soul had been stamped with a graver. Your character is what was pressed into you, caught in one exact word.

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crisis

κρίσις · krisis

a judgement, a sifting

Krisis is the moment of judgement, when one thing must be sifted from another and a decision made. A physician called the crisis the day a disease turned toward life or death. Every crisis of yours is really a summons to court: the hour has come to sift and to choose.

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ethics

ἠθική · ēthikē

the study of settled character (ēthos)

Ēthos is settled character, the soul's ingrained habit, the path it has worn. Ethics studies the groove those acts wear more than it studies the single acts. When Cicero rendered the word into Latin he coined moralis, and so we received a second, Latin name for the very same thing.

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atom

ἄτομος · atomos

the uncuttable (a + tomos)

Democritus imagined that cutting a thing cannot go on forever: at the end lies the atomos, 'the uncuttable'. Twenty-four centuries later we split the uncuttable in two and kept its old name. The name of the world's smallest brick is a promise we broke.

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idea

ἰδέα · idea

a thing seen (from idein, to see)

Plato's idea comes from idein, 'to see'. An idea is the look of a thing, its face, beheld by the mind rather than the eye. When an idea 'comes to you', in Greek you have just seen something.

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philosophy

φιλοσοφία · philosophia

love of wisdom (philia + sophia)

Tradition credits the word to Pythagoras: he refused, so the story goes, to be called a sage, a sophos, and named himself only a philosophos, a lover of wisdom rather than its owner. Historians doubt it happened that way. The modesty stayed inside the word regardless: a philosopher is a lifelong suitor of a truth he never quite matches.

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aesthetics

αἴσθησις · aisthēsis

sense perception

Aisthēsis is what reaches you through eyes, ears and skin. 'Aesthetics' was minted in the eighteenth century from this root as the science of sense knowledge – and only later narrowed into talk about beauty. Anaesthesia is its blood sister: aisthēsis switched off.

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problem

πρόβλημα · problēma

a thing thrown forward (pro + ballō)

Problēma is literally 'a thing thrown forward': the Greeks used it for a headland that blocks a sailor's course and for a shield held out before the body. The geometers then laid it on the tasks set before a student. Your 'we have a problem' is still honest: something lies across the road and will have to be moved.

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method

μέθοδος · methodos

the way along, a pursuit (meta + hodos)

Hodos is a road; methodos is the way you take after something, a pursuit along a track. For a Greek a method was the road thought walks to its goal step by step, instead of wandering. Descartes titled his most famous book a Discourse on the Method – on how to lay such a road for any mind.

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criticism

κριτική · kritikē

the art of judging and sifting (from krinō)

The same root as 'crisis' and 'criterion': krinō, to sift grain from chaff, to judge. A critic is by trade a judge who sifts. Kant raised the word into the titles of his major books: the Critique of Pure Reason is a trial to which reason summons itself.

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fantasy

φαντασία · phantasia

an appearing, an image (from phainō, to show)

Phainō means 'to bring into the light'; phantasia is what appears before the inner eye. In Aristotle it is a technical term: the soul's power to hold the image of a thing after the thing itself is gone. 'Phantom' grows from the same root, so your fantasy is, in Greek, a workshop of apparitions.

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organ

ὄργανον · organon

a tool, an instrument (from ergon, work)

An organon is a tool, and its root is the same ergon, 'work', that sits inside 'energy'. Aristotle called the hand the tool of tools, and his logical treatises were gathered by his followers under the title Organon – the instrument of thinking. The organ in your chest and the organ in a cathedral are still one word: an instrument that does work.

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eureka

εὕρηκα · heurēka

I have found it (from heuriskō)

The tale comes from Vitruvius: Archimedes, lowering himself into a bath, saw the answer to the crown problem and ran through the city naked, shouting heurēka – 'I have found it!'. The story was written down two centuries later, so the run may be invention; the verb is real. From the same root comes heuristics, the science of how things get found.

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theatre

θέατρον · theatron

the place for looking (from theaomai)

Theatron is literally a 'watching-place', the spot from which one looks. The same root gave us 'theory': contemplation, the mind's act of looking. Theatre and theory are siblings, both about a human being who sits down and watches with care.

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drama

δρᾶμα · drama

a deed, an action (from draō, to do)

Drama in Greek is simply 'a doing', a thing performed rather than reported. Tragedy showed a deed live on stage instead of relaying it through the chorus. When your life turns into 'real drama', you are saying the hour of action has come, though you never guess it.

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catastrophe

καταστροφή · katastrophē

an overturning, a sudden turn

It is a stagehand's word. Katastrophē is an 'overturning', the sudden swerve by which a tragedy flips its hero's fortune in the closing act. Every catastrophe of yours is, by the Greek reckoning, the final scene where the plot wheels around.

Calque

hypocrite

ὑποκριτής · hypokritēs

an actor

The Ukrainian litsemir is a home-made calque, built from 'face' and 'to measure'. The Greek word behind the idea is hypokritēs, and it meant an actor, the man who speaks from behind a mask. Socrates was tried by men wearing the mask of civic virtue: the theatre killed him.

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scene

σκηνή · skēnē

a tent, a booth

The skēnē was the tent behind the playing floor where actors changed their masks; its wall served as the backdrop, and in time the tent's name spread to the whole stage. Augustine would move the action inward: a person's main stage stands in the heart. When you 'take the stage', in Greek you are stepping out of a tent.

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chorus

χορός · choros

a dance; a band of dancers

Choros first meant the dance and the dancing-ground; the band that sang in a tragedy danced as well, keeping step. In the Greek theatre the chorus was the city's voice commenting on the hero's deeds. Our choir kept the singing and lost the dancing – of the old word, the motionless half remains.

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orchestra

ὀρχήστρα · orchēstra

the dancing floor (from orcheisthai, to dance)

The orchēstra was the round trodden floor in front of the stage where the chorus danced; the word comes from orcheisthai, 'to dance'. Two millennia later European theatres seated their musicians on that spot, and the floor handed them its name. A symphony orchestra is named after a patch of ground people once danced on.

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mechanics

μηχανή · mēchanē

a device, a cunning contrivance

A mēchanē is an ingenious device, and also the cunning itself: through Latin it gave us 'machination'. In the theatre the word named the crane that lowered a god onto the stage to untangle the plot – the trick is still called deus ex machina, 'the god from the machine'. Mechanics is the science of devices that outwit nature: the lever lifts what the arm cannot.

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enthusiasm

ἐνθουσιασμός · enthousiasmos

a god within (en + theos)

Entheos means 'having a god inside'. Enthusiasm first named divine possession, the state of the prophetess through whom Apollo speaks. When you take up a task with enthusiasm, you are saying a god has moved in.

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panic

πανικός · panikos

belonging to Pan

The god Pan, goat-legged lord of wild places, liked to send a sudden reasonless terror over travellers in the noon hush of the woods. Such fear was called panikos, 'Pan's'. Your panic before an exam still carries the name of a forest god who frightens for no reason.

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charisma

χάρισμα · charisma

a gift of grace (from charis)

Charis is grace, a gift given for free. Paul called the charismata the Spirit's gifts, handed out to the congregation. Nineteen hundred years on, Max Weber lifted this churchly word and hung it on political leaders; when you say a leader has charisma, you are saying grace rests on him.

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stoic

Στοά · stoa

the painted porch

Zeno taught under an open colonnade at the edge of the Athenian market – the Stoa Poikilē, the 'Painted Porch'. His pupils were nicknamed, simply, 'the men from the porch'. When you bear misfortune 'stoically', you are quoting the address of a school twenty-three centuries old.

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cynic

κυνικός · kynikos

dog-like (from kyōn, dog)

Diogenes lived in a barrel, scorned decency, and did in public what people hide. The Athenians nicknamed him the Dog, kyōn, and his school became the 'dog-like' one. The modern cynic who believes in nothing is a distant heir of a philosopher who barked at his city's hypocrisy.

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epicurean

Ἐπίκουρος · epikouros

after the name of Epicurus

Epicurus taught that the highest pleasure is calm of soul and the absence of pain, still water rather than a feast. History played a cruel joke on his name: today an 'epicurean' is a gourmet who lives for taste and luxury. A philosopher of moderation was turned into a restaurant advertisement.

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platonic

Πλατωνικός · platōnikos

after the name of Plato

'Platonic love' is a Renaissance coinage. The Florentine Marsilio Ficino, in the fifteenth century, gave the name to Plato's ascent from love of a body upward to love of beauty itself, described in the Symposium. Passing through the salons, the phrase wore down to 'love without the body'. Plato meant a staircase to heaven; we kept only its first and safest step.

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sympathy

συμπάθεια · sympatheia

feeling-with (syn + pathos)

Syn means 'together', pathos 'suffering, feeling'. The Stoics taught a cosmic sympatheia: the world is a living body, and when one part hurts, the rest answer. The Ukrainian spivchuttia is an exact calque of the word, so sympathy and compassion walk your language as a pair: the borrowed coin and its home-made cast.

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melancholy

μελαγχολία · melancholia

black bile (melas + cholē)

Greek medicine explained temperament by a blend of four fluids; an excess of black bile, melaina cholē, produced sorrow without cause. The diagnosis died long ago, the word lives on. Aristotle's school even asked why all outstanding men are melancholics – sadness already had a reputation for keeping talent company.

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cosmos

κόσμος · kosmos

order, adornment

The first Greek word for the universe meant 'order' and 'adornment'. The same kosmos gave us 'cosmetics': the Greeks named the sky with the same word as make-up. To them the universe was order laid over the void, carefully adorned, like a face before a feast.

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chaos

χάος · chaos

a gap, a yawning void

In Hesiod chaos is a gap, a yawning emptiness that opened first of all, before the world and the gods. The word is kin to 'yawn' and 'chasm'. We toss it around daily about a messy room and never hear the primal abyss beneath it.

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harmony

ἁρμονία · harmonia

a carpenter's joint

At first harmonia was the joint by which a carpenter fits plank to plank. Pythagoras carried the word into sound when he heard that strings agree only in simple numeric ratios. Ever since, 'harmony' has meant the fittedness of the world – and the beauty lecture claims that the joint can be measured.

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planet

πλανήτης · planētēs

a wanderer (from planasthai, to wander)

The stars cross the sky in formation, and only a few lights break rank, looping against the stream. The Greeks nicknamed them planētes asteres – 'wandering stars', vagrants of the sky. The Earth, it turned out later, is one of the vagrants: you were born on a wanderer.

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climate

κλίμα · klima

a slope, an inclination (from klinō, to lean)

Klima is a slope, from klinō, 'to lean'. Greek geographers divided the earth into belts by the angle at which sunlight strikes the ground: the farther north, the steeper the slant and the colder the air. All climate talk is, by the Greek account, talk of geometry: the angle at which the sun hits you.

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gospel

εὐαγγέλιον · euangelion

good news (eu + angelos)

Euangelion is 'good news', and hidden inside it sits angelos, a messenger, an angel. The Gospel is the phrase 'good news' spoken in Greek rather than the title of a holy book. The same runner who carried word of victory from the battlefield lent his name both to the angels and to the four texts about Jesus.

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martyr

μάρτυς · martys

a witness

The Ukrainian muchenyk grew from muka, 'torment', and leads through suffering. The Greek word behind the idea is martys, and it means a witness, someone who saw and testifies. A martyr is one who testifies to what he saw at the cost of his life; the suffering was added later, along with our word.

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apocalypse

ἀποκάλυψις · apokalypsis

an unveiling (apo + kalyptō)

Apokalypsis is, literally, an 'unveiling', the tearing away of a curtain to show what hid behind it. Girard says the Bible slowly lifts the veil off the scapegoat mechanism, exposing the victim's innocence. The apocalypse is an exposure rather than the end of the world; the moment the mask is finally pulled off violence.

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heresy

αἵρεσις · hairesis

a choice, a chosen course (from haireō)

Hairesis first meant simply a choice, a chosen line of thought; the Sadducees and Pharisees were haireseis, that is, schools. Heresy is, quite literally, 'the thing you chose for yourself' instead of receiving from the community. The word became a verdict only once private choice came to count as betrayal.

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dogma

δόγμα · dogma

a settled opinion (from dokeō, to seem)

Dogma comes from dokeō, 'to seem'. At first it was merely what 'seemed' right to a community and was then decreed, like a resolution of the assembly. The rigid, frozen dogma of our usage was once a living opinion that someone proposed and the rest agreed to.

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talent

τάλαντον · talanton

a pair of scales; a weight of silver

A talanton is a pair of scales, and then the weight they measure: a talent of silver ran to tens of kilograms, a whole fortune. In Jesus' parable a master hands his servants talents, and the one who buries his hears the verdict. Through the parable the coin became giftedness in every language of Europe – when you 'bury your talent', you are still quoting the Gospel of Matthew.

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symbol

σύμβολον · symbolon

half of a broken token (syn + ballō, to throw together)

The Greeks would snap a potsherd or a knucklebone in two: the host kept one half, the guest carried off the other, and a generation later their descendants knew each other by fitting break to break. A symbolon is 'a thing brought together', an object that needs its second half. That is why the Christian Creed is called the Symbol of Faith: it is the half by which one's own recognise their own.

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idol

εἴδωλον · eidōlon

an image, a phantom (from idein, to see)

Eidōlon derives from eidos, 'the look of a thing': an image, and in Homer also the phantom of the dead. The root is the same as in 'idea', so idea and idol are close kin, each meaning 'a thing seen'. The difference lies in the act: before the one a person thinks, before the other a person bows down.

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canon

κανών · kanōn

a straight rod, a measure

A kanōn is the straight rod a mason holds against a wall to check that it is true; from there, a measure in general. The Church used it to name the list of books checked against that measure, and later the rule itself. In fairness: the word's last root is likely Semitic – kanna, a reed; Greece whittled a foreign cane into the measuring instrument of the West.

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telephone

τῆλε + φωνή · tēle + phōnē

distant sound

When nineteenth-century engineers needed a name for a 'distant voice', they went to the Greek treasury for coin: tēle, 'far', plus phōnē, 'sound'. Telescope, telegraph, and television were struck the same way. Greek stayed the living mint of the West thousands of years after anyone last spoke it.

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biology

βίος + λογία · bios + logia

the study of life

The word 'biology' is younger than the steam engine: it was struck around 1800 from bios, 'life', and -logia, 'study'. The ancient Greeks, from whom both roots are taken, never heard the word itself. The West still strikes fresh coin from the inherited treasury whenever a new science is born.

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psychology

ψυχή + λογία · psychē + logia

the study of the soul

Psychē is the soul, and even the breath, since for the Greeks life came and went with breathing. 'Psychology' too is a late coinage, assembled from Greek roots in the modern age. The science that swears to be the most up-to-date carries in its name the ancient Greek word for 'soul' – the same word that meant a butterfly.

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dinosaur

δεινός + σαῦρος · deinos + sauros

a terrible lizard

In 1842 the English anatomist Richard Owen realised the fossil bones belonged to a separate tribe of reptiles and struck a name for it from the Greek treasury: deinos, 'terrible, wondrous', plus sauros, 'lizard'. No Greek ever saw a dinosaur or heard the word. Every three-year-old who says 'tyrannosaurus' is spending a Greek coin minted in the nineteenth century.

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automaton

αὐτόματος · automatos

that which acts of itself

The word is older than the technology: in the Iliad the tripods forged by Hephaestus roll to the assembly of the gods and back by themselves, automatoi. Heron of Alexandria was already writing a treatise on the building of automata – little theatres that performed without a human. The coffee machine at your bus stop fulfils a dream nearly three thousand years old: that a thing should work on its own.