PYRRHIC
Pyrrhus, king of Epirus (319–272BC), won a battle but at great cost. He was a Greek who tried to unite the various Greek States against the increasing power of Rome. He led a Greek Army into Italy and, at the Battle of Asculum in southern Italy in 279BC, he defeated a numerically superior Roman Army but lost many of his own troops. He was congratulated on his triumph and replied ‘one more victory like that will finish me’. Practically from then on, such a bloody and costly win became known as a Pyrrhic victory.
Pyrrhus himself met a peculiar end. Invading the city of Argos, an old woman threw down a roof tile which knocked him for six, enabling an opponent to chop off the king’s head.
QUIXOTIC
In the first great European comic novel, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547–1616) created one of the seminal figures in world literature, Don Quixote. He was a middle-aged gentleman gone soft in the head, who was obsessed with chivalry and romance and, being quite deluded, went off on an adventure with his dimwit neighbour Sancho Panza. Quixote tilted at windmills, and turned just about every available encounter into a chivalrous quest carried out in the name of his lady Dulcinea – in reality an unknowing farm girl – before returning home disillusioned. It is that practice of doing something strange, perhaps knowing that it will be ultimately unrewarding, which we describe as ‘quixotic’.
RABELAISIAN
It is sometimes incorrectly used to mean out of control or even orgiastic, but the original meaning of the word is to describe something as similar to the works of François Rabelais himself – down-to-earth and humorous.
In his published works, Rabelais (1494–1553) was many things that most writers of the era were not – satirical, funny, humanist and full of coarseness such as double entendres which raise eyebrows even today. His best-known works are the novels Gargantua and Pantagruel, the former giving us the eponym ‘gargantuan’ (see above).
Rabelais was a doctor by profession, but his sympathies lay very much with the common people, and that earthiness and humanist sympathies saw him condemned by the Church. He is said to have died muttering that he was ‘going to the Great Perhaps’.
RUBENESQUE
The artist Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) loved big, voluptuous girls, and painted plenty of them. So many, indeed, that a plump, curvy woman is often described as ‘Rubenesque’, especially if she’s naked in a painting.
RUNYONESQUE
Damon Runyon (1880–1946) wrote about a huge cast of characters in his short stories set in and around Broadway in New York. The big-city low-lifers he depicted ranged from two-bit gangsters to showgirls, and Runyon was clearly writing from personal experience as many of the characters could be identified with real-life people. Runyon was cremated when he died and, according to his instructions, his ashes were scattered from an aircraft down on to Broadway.
SEMITIC
The Semitic peoples of the Middle East are supposedly all descended from Noah’s son Shem. It is the Semitic languages and cultures, rather than a shared genetic inheritance, which determined if someone was or is a Semite. According to the Bible, Shem lived until he was 600, and one of his descendants was Abraham.
SHAVIAN
Since the eponym is derived from his name, we can say with certainty that George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) was the first, and best, exponent of Shavian wit. The Irish writer, political theorist and co-founder of the London School of Economics made many famous witticisms: ‘England and America are two countries separated by a common language’; ‘I often quote myself, it adds spice to my conversation’; and ‘If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion’ are just three.
SOCRATIC
‘I know enough to know that I will never know enough’ is a rough approximation of the greatest piece of wisdom enunciated by Socrates (469–399BC). His school in ancient Athens became the centre for a new type of philosophical learning, and his most famous pupil, Plato, recorded many of his master’s musings.
The man himself was an oddball. Apparently quite ugly, after serving as a soldier, he took to walking round Athens barefoot and stinking as he refused to wash daily. His Socratic method of philosophical inquiry has influenced much of western thought, yet the man himself appears to have been a walking disaster area, upsetting people in power. Ordered by the Athenian authorities to kill himself in punishment for ‘corrupting the youth’, he calmly drank poisonous hemlock.
STAKHANOVITE
The human robot of the USSR Alexey Stakhanov (1906–77) was plucked from obscurity by the propaganda machine of the Soviet Union to become the poster boy of the Government’s drive to increase productivity in coal mines and elsewhere. Stakhanov broke all sorts of records with his ability to hew coal quicker than anyone else, and his achievements were lauded to inspire Soviet workers to emulate him.
There have been doubts about whether he did actually cut 227 tonnes of coal in a single shift, but what is not in doubt is that his name is now attached to colossal feats in the workplace, and workers who triumph with their drudgery.
STENTORIAN
In the world’s first great surviving historical-mythical novel, Homer’s Iliad, we find a description of Stentor (book V, v 783), reportedly a herald who had a voice as loud as 50 men. Unfortunately, Stentor took on the herald of the Olympian gods, Hermes, in a shouting match and lost – fatally so, as his shouting proved too much for his all-too-human lungs.
He remains the precursor of town criers everywhere, as well as loud politicians such as the Reverend Ian Paisley and actors such as Brian Blessed and Gerard ‘this is Sparta’ Butler.
Stentorian nowadays sometimes means ‘over the top’ as much as loud. That is an obvious development of the word.
Stentor also gave his name to a genus of single-cell organisms found on algae. These protozoa look like trumpets, hence the name of Stentor, though you would need a microscope to check the resemblance, as Stentors are only a few millimetres long.
STONEWALL, STONEWALLER
For some inexplicable reason, the nickname of an American Civil War general is now routinely used to describe a penalty in British football, as in ‘it’s a stonewaller, ref’. The original Stonewall was Confederate General Thomas Jonathan Jackson (1824–63) who gained his nickname in the First Battle of Bull Run in 1861, when a fellow general is reputed to have said ‘there’s Jackson standing like a stone wall’. Jackson’s troops refused to yield and suffered heavy losses, becoming known thereafter as the Stonewall brigade while he became ‘Stonewall Jackson’. He did not enjoy the name for too long, as he died of pneumonia two years later after being accidentally shot by his own side.
Any form of firm defence in sport or other activity soon became known as stonewall, but stonewaller is a recent development, coming from the seemingly endless ability of footballers and commentators to mangle the English language – somebody clearly thought ‘stonewall’ meant certain, and then ‘-er’ was added to change the eponym’s meaning entirely. But that’s the trouble with followers of the beautiful game – their brains are in their feet.
STYGIAN
Usually only seen describing darkness or depth, this word comes from the River Styx, one of the nine rivers of the Underworld in