“Kyrie, it is Zeus’ anathema on our epoch for the dynamism of our economies and the heresy of our economic methods and policies that we should agonize the Scylla of numismatic plethora and the Charybdis of economic anemia. It is not my idiosyncrasy to be ironic or sarcastic, but my diagnosis would be that politicians are rather cryptoplethorists.” With these words, predominantly of Greek origin, Greek economist Prof. Xenophon Zolotas addressed his non-Greek-speaking audience at the closing session of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development on 10/02/59. His speech was a demonstration of the influence of Greek on English vocabulary: an influence so strong and widespread, that, together with Latin, Greek helped change and shape the morphological character of the English vocabulary.
At the time of the Renaissance, Greek and Latin, the Classical languages, enriched the English vocabulary with hundreds of words with which to express the exciting developments of the era. Greek became a major source of specialist terms in the fields of medicine, anatomy, biology, astronomy, science, technology, grammar, literary criticism, and publishing. In some cases, Latin and French acted as “relay” languages for loanwords of Greek origin; in other cases, Greek roots and words were borrowed directly into English. Whichever the route, English would never be the same without words such as photography, phenomenon, telephone, microscope, metaphor, critic, mathematics, hypothesis, pathology, crisis, phobia, lexicon, hierarchy, pentagon, colon, encyclopedia, academy, angel, category, pedagogical, astronaut, logistics, economize, ecology, pediatrician, nausea, patriotism, patriarch, syndrome, empathy, sympathy, dynamic, dogma, theology, nostalgia, didactic, apologize, criterion, zealot, technician, aristocratic, cyclamen, euphemism, zoo, planet, athlete-– to mention but a few examples of words of Greek origin.
The following list is a sampler of (more or less) commonly used Greek words and phrases in modern English.
agora (original meaning: “assembly”): place of assembly, market-place (in ancient Greece), open space (cf. agoraphobia); the Greek equivalent of the Roman forum.
eureka (literally “I have found”: perfect tense of the ancient Greek verb heuriskein, to find, to discover): a cry of triumph at a discovery; first uttered by Greek mathematician Archimedes (3rd century BC) on discovering that the amount of displaced water in his bath would point to the purity of gold in his gold crown; the state motto of California.
gnothi seauton (Ancient Greek for “know thyself”): the precept of self-knowledge, carved in the stone of the pronaos (the entry porch) of the temple of Delphi; see also meden agan
hapax legomenon (literally “(something) said only once”): a linguistic term of textual criticism that denotes a word that is attested only once in a corpus of texts; also abbreviated as hapax; plural form: hapax legomena
hoi polloi (Greek for “the many”): used as a dismissive description of the common people, of the masses, although on occasion it is (wrongly) used in the opposite sense, i.e. to denote the rich and privileged.
logos (Greek for both “word” and “reason”): in the Greek New Testament, logos denotes Jesus Christ.
meden agan (literally “nothing in excess”): the precept of simplicity, carved in the stone of the pronaos (the entry porch) of the temple of Delphi; see also gnothi seauton
