Question: I was eating dinner with my aunt one Sunday afternoon, when she told me about a house that she and my uncle were having trouble selling. She said that the house had become "a real albatross." I'm assuming she meant this in the sense of "burden." Can you explain how this use of the term came about?
Answer: As you may already know, "albatross" literally refers to a large web-footed seabird with long, slender wings and an uncanny ability to glide for long distances. Figuratively, however, "albatross" can also be used as your aunt used it, to mean "something that causes persistent deep concern or anxiety" or "something that greatly hinders accomplishment." This proverbial albatross is often said to be hanging "around one's neck."The figurative senses of "albatross" stem directly from a widely read 18th-century poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge called "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." In the poem, a mariner at sea inexplicably kills a friendly albatross that had just proven itself to be an omen of his ship's good fortune. When the ship later becomes stranded under the scorching sun of the equator, the mariner's shipmates blame his vicious act for their bad luck and hang the dead albatross around his neck to punish him. The mariner bears this burden for much of the poem until, surrounded by the corpses of his dehydrated shipmates, he recognizes the beauty that lies in the living creatures of the deep. At this moment the albatross magically falls from the mariner's neck and slips into the sea.
In 1936 Coleridge's image of the albatross found its way into a poem by Dylan Thomas called "Grief Thief of Time." The poem observes how "the old forget the grief, hack of cough, the hanging albatross." A year later, clearer evidence of the "cause of anxiety" sense of "albatross" appeared in an article from the New York Times, in which a novelist's son remarked that his mother's most popular character, for which he was the inspiration, had been an "albatross" to him throughout his life. (The novelist was Frances Eliza Burnett, and her son was the model for the title character of "Little Lord Fauntleroy.")
The origin of the word "albatross" involves several other types of birds, including a few jailbirds. It probably formed as an alteration of the obsolete English term "alcatrace," which originally referred to a different kind of seabird now called a frigate bird. The change from "alca-" to "alba-" may have occurred due to the influence of "albus," the Latin word for "white," which happens to be the color of most albatrosses.
"Alcatrace" itself comes from "alcatraz," a Spanish and Portuguese term applied to yet another bird, this time the pelican. "Alcatraz," of course, also gave us the familiar name of Alcatraz Island, formerly the site of one of our country's most famous federal prisons. The island was named "Isla de los Alcatraces" ("Isle of the Pelicans") by Spanish explorer Juan Manuel de Ayala when he explored the seabird habitat in 1775. The word "alcatraz" derives from an Arabic term, "al-ghattas," which refers not to an albatross or a frigate bird or a pelican, but to a kind of sea eagle.
Question: Why do we call an especially flattering biography a "hagiography"?
Answer: You may have already guessed from the meanings of more common words such as "biography" and "autograph" that "-graphy" has something to do with books and writing. If so, you are right. The combining form "-graphy" comes from the Greek word "graphein," meaning "to write."
"Hagio-" comes from a Greek word too - one that means "saintly" or "holy." The word "hagiography," first recorded in 1821, originally referred to biographies of saints, but these days you are apt to see the word applied more broadly to any idealizing or idolizing biography. In other words, a hagiography is a biography that treats its subject as if he or she were a saint.