World Wide Words -- holiday special 1

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS

This is a reminder that World Wide Words is currently taking a
much-needed holiday break. The next issue of the newsletter is
scheduled for 25 March. Meanwhile, here's a little something to
be going on with:


Weird Words: Smaragdine
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Having an emerald-green colour.

Holiday reading is a great source of interesting vocabulary. This
turned up in S M Stirling's time-travel story, Island in the Sea of
Time, in which Nantucket Island is thrown back 3000 years through
an unspecified event: "You could see smudges of black woodsmoke
drifting out over the smaragdine brightness of the harbor." Poul
Anderson's There Will be Time, another time-travel story, also
includes it: "On a transverse axis, vision reached from glittering
blue across the Sea of Marmora to a mast-crowded Golden Horn and
the rich suburbs and smaragdine heights beyond."

Fittingly, the term is ancient. It probably derives from Sanskrit
"marakata" for an emerald (though a Semitic source has also been
suggested). This was taken into Greek as "smaragdos", then to Latin
"smaragdus" and thence into English as "smaragd" as a name for the
same stone. "Smaragdine" came from Latin "smaragdinus", relating to
the emerald. "Emerald" also comes from the same source, via Old
French "e(s)meraud".

Its most famous appearance in literature is the Smaragdine Table of
Hermes Trismegistus, an emerald-green tablet supposedly found by
Alexander the Great in the tomb of Hermes, though it was actually a
late medieval forgery. On it was said to be written, in Phoenician
characters, the 13 precepts underlying alchemy, including (in this
translation from Latin by Sir Isaac Newton), "That which is below
 is like that which is above and that which is above is like that
which is below to do the miracles of one only thing."


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