More Rare Words--Fourth Essay

When we patiently study words, we discover that, eventually, they quietly give up their meaning. All of them give up all of it. When we have meaning, we have the building blocks for significant communication. I wanted to begin today with a word not appearing in most dictionaries, antaean or Antaean. It is an adjectival form of the name Antaeus, a mythological figure whom Hercules encountered in his travels. A brief summary of the story is here. Hercules discovered that the key to Antaeus' strength was his "groundedness," or his connection to the earth. Each time Antaeus was thrown by Hercules to the earth, he arose with powers renewed. Only when he was lifted from the earth was his strength drained and Hercules was able to kill him. Thus, an antaean person today would be one who is well-grounded, one who is practical, nourished by the common stuff of life, one who gains his/her strength from the soil. One might extend the meaning of this word to include someone whose strength is in "basic principles" or the root metaphors of a discipline.

Indeed, if we think about Antaeus and his renewed strength from connection to his mother earth (he was the son of Gaia), we see that our strength in general relates to our ability to be rooted in basic principles. When our feet leave the ground and we "soar," we begin to lose our strength. One of my most sadly-memorable experiences from undergraduate and graduate life is that speakers (and I heard many!) would, in order to try to appear knowledgeable, too quickly "leave the earth" in introducing concepts. As a result, they would not only lose their audience but they would, in a sense, lose their power. Almost all confusion in life can be removed by repairing to our "mother earth," or to the basic principles of our discipline. People lose their strength by being lifted "off the earth," by trying to make things more complex than they are, by losing touch with fundamental, life-giving issues. Thus, I think antaean is a sort of protean word, a word useful in a number of varying situations in life to describe a person who is grounded in basic principles and lives/operates by them.

One of the reasons I often don't interact to a great extent with people is that I find that I am often onfused by them when they try to communicate with me. They don't know how to "begin from the beginning," to explain how their confusion arose, etc. I used to take it as my mission to clean up people's communication confusion. I will still do that, for a fee. But I generally let pepole wallow in the confusion, but I wonder why they are satisfied to live this way. Our basic confusion, and unhappiness, in life arises because we abandon our deep antaean sources of strength.

In the myth Hercules defeated Antaeus by lifting him from the ground and waiting until his strength had "drained" from him. Sometimes we remove ourselves "from the ground" by soaring to lofty heights, before usually crashing unceremoniously. But sometimes people try to take us from our moorings, our basic values, either through money, offers of power, sexual favors or other things that will muddle and confuse our minds. They, as it were, "lift" us. They are the Hercules' that we meet, those people who seem so powerful, so gifted, so incredibly talented and alluring, that we just want to leave the sources of our strength and give ourselves over to them. But, as the story of Antaeus tells us, when we lose our connectedness to our own earth, to the basic nourishing principles of our lives, we become weak. To use a biblical phrase, from the story of Samson, when our hair is cut we become "weak and like any other man."

It is almost impossible to resist the urge to "leave the ground." After all, aren't we made to "soar?" Isn't life more than just the pedestrian plodding from one task to another? Shouldn't our heart "take wing" occasionally and just fly? Maybe, but when it does, ask yourself if your feet are still planted in the nourishing soil of life. We plant our feet firmly if always are inclined to return to basic principles. Sometimes we feel that so doing will label us as "stupid" or "elementary" in all we do. But resist those feelings, and never be afraid to rediscover your antaean strength. You will be glad you did.

Branching Out

So, I faced a dilemma after reveling in antaean. On the one hand I felt inclined to launch into a few other mythological terms (sisyphean, stygian, tantalizing); on another hand I wanted to look at a few rhetorical terms near where antaean should appear in the dictionary (antanaclasis, antanagoge); then, I just wanted to continue expositing some words completely unrelated to antaean. When you let words take you where they will, you will be rewarded in ways you hadn't expected. So, let's go on our mythological jaunt for a second. There is always another essay to take us to other areas.

Something sisyphean is fruitless and endless. It is named from the former king of Corinth, whose punishment in Tartarus for his crimes of abusing travelers and betraying the secrets of the gods was to roll a block of stone up a steep hill but, when the stone had reached the top, it would roll back down. Then the whole process began all over again, without any relief. Thus, a sisyphean task is endless and the labor expended to try to perform it is fruitless. Unlike the cleaning of the augean stables, where the task appeared endless and the work useless, a sisyphean task truly yields no results. But how do you tell the difference between a sisyphean and an augean task? That is wisdom.... Actually, the word augean generally means "abominably filthy." The Augean stables were the stables of Augeas, legendary king of Elis, which contained 3,000 oxen and hadn't been cleansed for 30 years. It is slightly worse than most teenagers' bedrooms.

Let's conclude with the word stygian. Since it also is derived from the Greek, and Greek endings are "ean" rather than "ian," why is it stygian rather than stygean? Ah, because it came from Greek into Latin as Stygius, and our English word is derived immediately from the Latin. Phew. Just as I suggested that the meaning of augean ought to be expanded to include "seemingly fruitless" as well as "abominably filthy," so "stygian" has two meanings that don't seem at first to relate to one another. The river Styx, by the way, was the river you crossed to get you into the infernal regions of classical mythology. It became associated with an oath (you swore by the river Styx) as well as something infernal or hellish. One could face "stygian darkness" or make a "stygian (i.e., binding) oath." From 1635: "Sometimes they whoop, sometimes their Stygian cries Send their black-Santos to the blushing skies."

Well, we just have to continue and develop these ruminations in the next essay.

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