The Vocabularist: The roots of the word 'eurosceptic'
- Published
Man at pro-European demonstration in Athens
With possible Greek and British exits from the European Union constantly in the news, we find the British word "eurosceptic" has a rich Greek heritage.
Europa (or Europe, pronounced you-ropey) in Greek mythology was a princess from Tyre in modern Lebanon who was kidnapped and taken to Crete.
Her name in Greek literally means "broad-faced or "wide-eyed" from eurys (wide) and ops (which means eye, but perhaps also face). The historian Herodotus (485-424BC) records the story that Europa was kidnapped by visiting sailors.
Remarkably for someone who liked a good story as much as he did, he did not mention the myth that she was seduced by Zeus in the form of a bull and taken to Crete on his back. If the tale was unknown to Herodotus it became celebrated soon after - on a vase by the potter Asteas (c350BC) Europe is sitting on the bull and is helpfully labelled, external.
Pictures of a girl with a bull are common on vases going back to about 500BC. Greek writers had already given Europa's name to the sector of the world which came to a point between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. What that has to do with a Phoenician princess, bull-loving or otherwise, is unclear - Herodotus himself says he is baffled by it, external.
There is a suggestion that the continent's name may come from the Semitic languages of people further east - such as "ereb" in the Mesopotamian tongue Akkadian, meaning "sunset" and therefore "west".
There are certainly Greek words borrowed from Semitic languages, including the ancestors of our words camel, sapphire and even sack, not to mention the Greek alphabet and the names of its letters.
Still, the sceptics might have had something to say about the suggestion. They were a school of philosophers, external, admirers of Pyrrho of Elis (c360-270BC) who allegedly accompanied Alexander the Great on his campaign in India and may have studied Indian beliefs.
Different sceptics held different views - but all are versions of the theme of taking nothing on trust, and that is what the word has come to mean.
"Skeptikos" in Greek is related to "skeptomai" meaning "look at carefully". And to the noun "skope", meaning lookout (which of course gives us periscope - peri means "around"), and more distantly to our word "spy".
The word "eurosceptic" appeared in the 1970s, but was not common till later. Even The Spectator archive, a treasure-house of euroscepticism, records it just once in June 1971, and not again until 1989.
We will see a good bit more of the word in the coming months.
The Vocabularist
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