The stories behind the words again:

Sphinx:Have you read Harry Potter and Goblet of fire?If you have,then you do remember the Sphinx Harry met in the maze during the Triwizard contest,the last task.In Greek Mythology,a Sphinx was a winged she-monster with the body of a lion but the breasts and head of a woman.Meanwhile,the Sphinx in Egypt is wingless and mostly has the head of a man.

But our concern is the she-monster.Again,according to Greek Mythology,there was a Sphinx is Thebes that proposed riddles to all the people,mostly Thebans,who crossed her path.She
strangled whoever failed to answer her riddle correctly and threw them over the cliff.In Latin sphinx means “the strangler”.No one had ever answered her riddles correctly till Oedipus,recently returned to Thebes.Her commonest riddle was this.”what walks on 4 legs in the morning,on 2 at noon and on 3 in the evening?”

To this Oedipus answered,”A man,for he crawls in the morning of his life,walks erect in the noon of his power and uses a crutch in the evening of his age.”The Sphinx was so astonished and frustrated at the same time,that she flung herself over a cliff.

Lesbian:A lesbian is a homosexual.Without going into rather lurid details,I will add that the word homosexual is often misused.The word homo in Latin means man but the same word in Greek means same.Hence,homodonts have teeth that are the same(of the same size).The word
homosexual has it’s roots in Greek.

Back to the point.There lived a poetess on the Island of Lesbos called Sappho.It’s alleged that she wrote a poem to Aphrodite pleading with her to help her,Sappho,arouse ardor in a certain woman.As a result,she was believed to be a lesbian which she was indeed,by birth but not necessarily by disposition.How the English adopted the word is another story.

Leopard:The word pard in Greek means panther, but the Greeks came up with the word pardos to mean a male panther. Then,it was believed that leopards were hybrids between lions and panthers.So they called them leopardos.The word leopardos is a combination of two Greek words. Leo which means lion and pardos which means male panther.However,scientist proved that leopards are a species of their own and not hybrids,but let the name be because it was already in use in Literature and Science itself.So the saying that “a leopard can’t change it’s spots” sounds apt considering that it can’t even change it’s name!

Guillotine:In the 18th Century,the use of hanging as a means of execution fell out of favour.Other means of execution that were more efficient had to be found.

Enter Dr. Joseph Guillotin,a French physician who was concerned that hanging caused a lot of pain and suffering to the condemned.So he made a machine that could make a clean cut through the neck of the victim causing little or no suffering at all.While promoting his machine to the French Assembly,he’s quoted to have said,”With this machine,I can whisk off your head in a twinkling and you feel no pain”.And his machine was as good as his word.Beheading originally reserved for the nobility,became the main means of execution.Later the spelling of the machine named after him,became guillotine.

Canada:It’s the second largest country in the world,I think(provided I was paying attention in my high school Geography lessons).

One story has it that two Spanish explorers reached a point just south of the present-day Canadian border.One of them scaled high to see what lay beyond.His partner asked him “que ve vd?”(what do you see?), to which the other answered “Aca nada”(“nothing’s there”).But the a whipped away by the wind, to make his reply ca’nada.

The other story is that of an Indian chief who while talking to the explorer Jacques Cartier,pointing to his village and waved his hand in a semi-circle,and said “kanata/kanada”.Jacques thought the chief meant that the entire region beyond the horizon was called “kanada/kanata”.The word kanata/kanada means village!

Hence the name Canada.