Taking advantage of a break in the brutal summer heat, I cut the grass this morning in the appropriate classical manner, boustrophedon, mowing across the yard and then turning in the opposite direction.
We have the word because of the way the Greeks plowed their fields. A Greek farmer directed his ox, bous, across the field and then made it turn, strephein, and plow a furrow in the opposite direction, alternating until it was time to call it a day.
The work of the ox informed writing and reading as well in the classical world, with texts running left to right and then right to left. Imagine mastering Latin, with lines of all-caps text (majuscule) running in alternate directions, with no punctuation and no spaces between words. And you thought the Wordle was a challenge.
The Greek ox also turns up in a couple of places in English.
Bucolic, "pastoral" or "rural," derives from boukolos, "herdsman."
And bulimia was coined from bous plus limos, "hunger," thus the appetite of an ox.
The movement of the ox also turns up in English. In Greek drama, the chorus performing choral odes moved first from right to left on the stage, the strophe, then reversed and moved from the left to the right, the antistrophe. Strophe in English is a term for a pattern of lines in poetry, similar to a stanza.
I did not know much of that—but you triggered a fuzzy bit of trivia about the development of TV by Philo Farnsworth (Wikipedia):
ReplyDeleteFarnsworth worked out the principle of the image dissector in the summer of 1921, not long before his 15th birthday, and demonstrated the first working version on September 7, 1927, having turned 21 the previous August. A farm boy, his inspiration for scanning an image as a series of lines came from the back-and-forth motion used to plow a field.[54][55] In the course of a patent interference suit brought by the Radio Corporation of America in 1934 and decided in February 1935, his high school chemistry teacher, Justin Tolman, produced a sketch he had made of a blackboard drawing Farnsworth had shown him in spring 1922. Farnsworth won the suit; RCA appealed the decision in 1936 and lost.[56]
Don't forget the apostrophe, another -strophe: turned away from.
ReplyDeleteI'm still waiting for peevers to demand that apostrophe be pronounced with three syllables, as I said here.
ReplyDelete