Friday, May 14, 2010

ήλεκτρον

I made some joke about the stage play, Electra, being "Electra-fying". And some friends thought it was a horrible pun. Which it was. But the 2 words are actually related, long lost cousins of a sort, and I simply re-uniting them.

Both the name "Electra' and our word "electricity" derive from the Ancient Greek word for "amber".

You can see why you would name a girl after a precious stone. Even in English, we name girls Amber.

But what, you may wonder, does amber have to do with electricity?
Ancient Greeks discovered that amber behaved oddly - like attracting feathers - when rubbed by fur or other objects. They didn't know what it was that caused this phenomenon. But the Greeks had discovered one of the first examples of static electricity.
This created a charge, albeit weak.
Such were the limits of antique Greek technique.

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