Greek to Me

"Why do we lean on dead languages for new things? Perhaps expressing these things in the language that is oldest, in words that we have in common with many other languages, gives us a touchstone."

Greek To Me: adventures of the Comma Queen is a memoir by self-admitted philhellene and best-selling American author, Mary Norris. She has been on the staff of The New Yorker for some 35 years, and a Page OK'er for twenty of those. Norris has been referred to by some as a prose goddess, or a comma queen. She begins by declaring her fascination with all things Greek, and explaining how and why she came to study ancient Greek under the aegis of The New Yorker.

She explains how the Greek alphabet derives from the Phoenician, and many other alphabets from Greek; why Athena is a good model for a copy editor; and she declares her respect for those authors of definitive works on Greek and Greece.

This is a memoir that isn't bound by chronology but is filled with Norris's love for Greek, and her experiences with Greek and in Greece. Norris takes us on her somewhat comic pilgrimage to Elefsina in search of the Eleusinian Mysteries; she details her short stage career in Greek tragedies, one that had her recalling her family's own tragedy and drawing on experiences of her own and those close to her; she describes days copy editing, nights immersed in Greek; skinny-dipping in Aphrodite's Bathing place in Crete; visits to, and exploration of, the Acropolis.

The echoes and connections in the English language that Norris makes with ancient Greek are sometimes obvious, sometimes personal and quite tenuous: when she explains it, an anthology is a word bouquet; Dipsás? (Are you thirsty?) has an obvious connection with dipsomaniac.

Norris notes today's reverse trends: audio books taking us back to the oral tradition; reading on devices requiring scrolling so many thousands of years after scrolls were abandoned for books; and texting language that omits vowels, just as the Phoenician alphabet did.

On alphabets, she tells us: "A 'character' is a symbol for recording language… the word comes from the ancient Greek charásso, meaning 'to make sharp, cut into furrows, engrave.' The leap from a symbol graved in stone to a person endowed with a sharply defined personality is a good example of the way a word ripples out into metaphor."

For the unenlightened, there is much to be learned from this memoir: where the terms uppercase and lowercase come from; that omicron literally means small O and Omega, big O; how the direction of text originated; the absence of spacing; the irony that the modern Greek word for eucalyptus derives from ancient Greek, but via English, as the English botanists who named it in Australia in 1788 did so from ancient Greek.

The etymology is often interesting: "If surgeons knew that the word surgery comes from the ancient Greek cheirougia (hand + work) meaning 'handiwork', and could apply as well to needlepoint as to brain surgery, they might not be so arrogant." Informative and entertaining.