Question: I have very limited French, but I do know that the word "chauffeur" is French. I also know that the French word for "drive" is "conduire." So why do we call a hired driver a "chauffeur"?Answer: You're right that "chauffeur" comes from French, specifically from the word "chauffeur" meaning "to heat." Why did our word for a driver come from "to heat" and not "to drive"? In French, "chauffeur" means literally "stoker," a person who maintains the fire that powers the steam engine of a locomotive or ship. In the 1890s, "chauffeur" also came to be used for the driver of an automobile, who in effect stoked the engine mechanically with the accelerator. Earlier, the compound "chauffeur-mecanicien" or "stoker-engineer" was applied to someone who both stoked an engine and ran it, and it is possible that "chauffeur" in the sense of "driver" is actually a shortened version of this compound. In any case, English speakers adopted "chauffeur" and used it for anyone driving an automobile. Only later did it come to mean a person hired to drive someone else's car.
Question: What is a "murmadon?" I heard it used in a radio news report, but didn't know what it meant, and I can't find it in the dictionary. Is there really such a word?
Answer: The word you're looking for has the unlikely spelling of "myrmidon." Yes, this really is a word, and a very old one at that. It goes back to the ancient Greek proper noun "Myrmidon," which referred to a member of a legendary Thessalian people who accompanied their king Achilles in the Trojan War. When used in its figurative sense, it means a loyal follower and especially a subordinate who executes orders unquestioningly or unscrupulously.
It is not a frequently used word, but does appear especially in the works of writers with bulging vocabulary muscles, as in this passage from "The Eustace Diamonds" by English novelist Anthony Trollope: "Within eight days she was to enter an appearance, or go through some preliminary ceremony, towards showing why she would not surrender her diamonds to the Lord Chancellor, or to one of those satraps of his, the Vice-Chancellors, or to some other terrible myrmidon."
The Myrmidons have been so called since the days of ancient Greece, but why were those legendary minions given that name? Two stories are often told and both relate to the word "myrmex," which is the Greek word for "ant." The first claims that the Thessalian Myrmidons were named after a legendary ancestor, a son of the god Zeus and the mortal Eurymedusa. According to Greek myth, Zeus supposedly seduced Eurymedusa while in the form of an ant. The second story claims that the Myrmidons were named after the population of Aegina died in a plague. Aeacus, king of the beleaguered island, prayed to Zeus for help, and the god transformed a colony of ants into humans to repopulate the land.
Question: The encyclopedia says that there was a politician in ancient Greece named Hyperbolus. Is this where we get the word "hyperbole"?
Answer: In the 5th century B.C., there was a rabble-rousing Athenian politician named Hyperbolus who often made exaggerated promises and claims that whipped people into a frenzy. But even though it sounds appropriate, Hyperbolus's name did not play a role in the development of the modern English word "hyperbole," which means "extravagant exaggeration." That noun does come to us from Greek (by way of Latin), but from the Greek verb "hyberballein," meaning "to exceed," not from the name of the Athenian demagogue.
Oddly, "hyperbole" is etymologically related to the word "devil." The Greek verb "hyperballein," which gave us "hyperbole," is a combination of the roots "hyper-," meaning "beyond, over," and "ballein," meaning "to throw." So how does this bring us to "devil"? The English word "devil" came to us (again by way of Latin) from the Greek word "diabolos," meaning "slanderer." "Diabolos" comes from "diaballein," "to throw across," from "dia-," "across," and, you guessed it, "ballein," "to throw." Other seemingly unrelated words in the "ballein" family include "metabolism," "problem," "parable" and "symbol."
This column was prepared by the editors of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition. Send questions to: Merriam-Webster's Wordwatch, P.O. Box 281, 47 Federal St., Springfield, MA 01102. 1999 Merriam-Webster Inc. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.