Tom STAFFORD
COMMENTARY
Last week I found myself waxing nostalgic for venereal disease.
Not the disease, mind you, which, to my knowledge — note to spouse — I’ve never had. I was, however, missing the term.
In my youth, venereal disease — VD — was applied to what now are called sexually transmitted diseases or STDs. I’ve also heard the variation sexually transmitted infection.
Frankly, STI sounds like a multinational corporation to me. But the basis for the name change is inarguable.
The newer names make it clear to everyone that sex is involved in the transmission of the disease or infection — clarity needed for the sake of public health and to clear the reputations of wrong accused toilet seats everywhere.
Still, the change in terminology has led Venus to be partially obscured — not the planet, the goddess.
As the goddess of love, her name is at the root of venereal, which means having to do with Venus or amorous love.
It’s hard to go anywhere in the English language without tripping over Roman and Greek roots.
Martial arts is an example. Because most of the martial arts studios we see teach Oriental fighting (karate, judo, taekwondo) we tend to forget the term derives from Mars, the Roman god of war.
Mars is to martial what part is to partial, Venus is to venereal and Rome is to Roman. Abraham Lincoln called Edwin Stanton, his secretary of war, Mars.
Last week I stumbled across an eight-legged Roman root I’d never known existed.
As most Spider-Man fans know, through their Spidey sense, spiders are classified as arachnids.
By now you may have the right question in mind: So who was Arachne?
Answer: She was a loser in a nasty girl fight of the sort we’ve been hearing more about lately.
According to the book I was reading, it wasn’t so much a fight as an assault.
Athena, the goddess of war, “was so jealous of Arachne’s exquisite tapestry that she smashed up her face with the ... shuttle of the loom provoking Arachne to hang herself.”
Feeling a little remorse, “Athena revived her, but as a spider, endlessly spinning its trailing web.”
To take one more step into the tangled word-webs we weave, arachnophobia, the word for fear of spiders, combines Arachne’s name with that of Phobos, a son of Mars, who is linked with fear and, hence, phobias.
Phobos’ brother Deimos, represents dread. The brothers’ names have been given two bodies that orbit Mars, the planet named for their daddy.
By the way, the author I quoted above is Elizabeth Abbott. It was in her fascinating study “A History of Celibacy” that I encountered Venus and was struck by these venereal thoughts.
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