Since 1992
Print and digital marketing
By Barbara McAllister
Word of the Day: Halcyon
July ushers in the halcyon days of summer. Pronounced HAL-see-yon, the word means idyllic, peaceful and calm, and its origin is with a bird. In Greek mythology, the daughter of Aeolus, the god of wind, was so grief-stricken to learn her husband was killed in a shipwreck that she threw herself into the sea. Before hitting the water, the gods transformed her into a kingfisher, “alkyon” in ancient Greek (sometimes spelled halcyon). In mythology, kingfishers built floating nests at sea and Aeolus restrains the wind and water to create calm protection for their nests so the eggs can hatch. Periods of unusual calm occur at certain times of year at sea, but I was disappointed to learn that kingfishers don’t build floating nests in the water. They dig holes in embankments in which they raise their young. That’s far less romantic than floating nests at sea.
Halcyon is not the only word named for a bird. A corbel, those vertical supports that stick out from a wall to support a shelf, are named for their resemblance to a raven’s beak, “corb” being the Latin term for raven. Similarly, a coccyx, the human tail bone, is named for the Greek word for cuckoo. The bony structure is thought to resemble the slightly curved beak of a cuckoo. The popular garden flower columbine comes from the Latin word for dove, columba, because the inverted flower looks like a cluster of doves. Canard is the French word for duck as well as the name of the small winglike projections on aircraft, named for its likeness to a duck’s profile. “Gazza,” Italian for “little magpie” is thought to have been the inspiration for calling a newspaper a gazette, a reference to a magpie’s chatter. The word pedigree is from the French “pied de grue,” literally “foot of a crane,” referring to the resemblance of the lines on a genealogical chart to the outline of a crane’s foot. In the case of the songbirds cardinals, the opposite is true. The bird was named for the bright red robes worn by Roman Catholic cardinals, not the other way around. The church cardinal came first.
