It’s been a while since we last enjoyed the etymological delights of a Word for Wednesday feature.
So, let’s delve into the archives and explore some book related terms and then we’ll have a story…
Archives, etymologically speaking, according to our good friends at the Online Etymology Dictionary, derives originally from the Ancient Greek word for public records – ta arkheia – the plural of arkheion which was the building where the records were kept. That word derives from arkhein which means to be the first, through the derivations which gave primacy to government as the ‘first place’.
It’s the same root of the arch in archduke and archipelago and arch-villain – a Latinised form of the Greek arkh-, arkhi- “first, chief, primeval” . We’ve already looked at the class-conscious derivation of villain, but let’s make a bad pun for a prime evil book-related sidestep for a moment and consider Arkham.
You might recognise the word from DC Comics’s notorious, fictional Arkham Asylum – more correctly the ‘Elizabeth Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane’, Gotham City’s distinctly porous (although allegedly high-security) facility for detaining psychopaths such as The Joker. Within Gotham’s backstory, it was named by the psychiatrist Armadeus Arkham, in honour of his mother who died prematurely… with assistance.
Anyway, Batman editor Jack C. Harris and writer Dennis O’Neil actually named Arkham Asylum in 1974 in homage to the works of H.P. Lovecraft, most immediately his fictional town of Arkham, Massachusetts (based significantly on the real town of Salem). By the above etymology, Arkham would probably mean ‘first settlement’ because of its common Old English suffix -ham.
Miskatonic – the name of both the river and the university in Lovecraft’s Arkham – is also etymologically interesting. There’s nothing good about the prefix ‘mis-‘ since it’s either from the Old English/Proto Germanic ‘mis-‘ meaning bad or wrong, or it’s from the Old French/Latin ‘mes-‘ meaning, er, bad or wrong.
It lucks out either way.
Chthonic is a lovely old word meaning ‘of the underworld’ from the Ancient Greek word for the earth – khthōn. Or maybe Lovecraft was thinking of catatonic when he named the river – the medical Latin catatonia is made from Ancient Greek kata meaning down and tonos for tone.
‘Bad underworld’ or ‘wrongly toned down’… either is appropriate for Miskatonic.
While we’re talking about fictional places, what’s the deal with ‘fiction’?
Firstly, it’s not etymologically related to fact. Facts were deeds before they were truths – from the Latin factum, meaning an event or occurrence. What they are now is apparently entirely arguable…
Fiction came into English in the 15th century from an Old French word ficcion meaning a fabrication or dissimulation. This in turn came from the Latin fictionem – a fashioning or feigning, which came from the same word root as fingers in the sense of shaping or devising something.
Any writers out there know all about shaping their fiction.
Go on, ask us – we’ll tell you!
And speaking of fiction it’s time to wrap things up, literally, with the repulsive anthropodermic bibliopegy. Well, that’s etymologically easy isn’t it? We just go to straightforward Ancient Greek roots to find…
- anthropo – from anthropos = man or human
- dermic – from derma = skin
- biblio – from biblion = book
- pegy – from pegia = to fasten
So it’s… fastening a book, or book-binding, using human skin.
That’s… disgustingly creepy.
Bookbinding using human skin is real enough, but it’s more common in fiction than in real life.
I wrote a short story, Under the Skin, which features such a loathsome text held in the archives of St Guinefort’s Library for the Thaumaturgic Arts.
If you’ve ever visited the lovely Edinburgh Central (Carnegie) Library on George IV Bridge, you might recognise some of the inspiration for St Guinefort’s slightly more fantastical library.
So follow that link to my story page, my friends, and have yourself a delightfully creepy Wednesday.
IMAGE credits:
Banner cropped from an image by WILLGARD from Pixabay
Joker cropped from an image by Daryl Govan from Pixabay
Tentacles image was photographed by me at the Southern Cross University’s Solitary Islands Aquarium in Coffs Harbour a few years ago.
Architectural drawing of Edinburgh Central Library by George Washington Browne