|
Words! Literacy Club is copyright © Lesley Catterall 2003-2006 All rights reserved. |
HOME |
|
Eponyms are words that have come into being from an association with a person’s name. You have to dig into Greek mythology to understand the denotation for “tantalize” as several club members recently discovered. |
The Tantalizing Tale of
|
|
Inquiries into how I would teach reading, prompted several sessions where I invited students to interpret some of Aesop’s Fables. Using Helen Ward’s wonderfully illustrated retelling (details below) students were given paragraphs to read orthographically. The very first fable, Sour Grapes, generated a wealth of opportunity to expand vocabulary and deepen understanding. This tale was also the source of the investigation into <temptation>. The tale begins: “There was once a bunch of particularly fine grapes hanging temptingly from a vine that had wound its way up a tree. And as usual with such unguarded temptations there was soon also a fox. The tantalizing fruits hung just a little higher than the fox could reach but he would not be thwarted.” |
Real Reading in Action |
|
And so we had more than enough to start our interpretations. While working with his mother, Hamza Khan gave an excellent recital of this passage pronouncing the words most beautifully, but afterwards admitted that he didn’t really know what some of these words meant—thus presenting an excellent opportunity for an investigation. Hamza has been engaged in real orthography with his older sister Mahnoor and his mother Rabia since September 2005 and knows how to analyse a word to find its base element. Hamza produced his word sum but was stumped when it came to using this information to better understand the meaning of the word. He needed a more detailed Orthographic Analysis. |
|
For the full story of King Tantalus click the picture. |
|
“Unwitting Wisdom—An Anthology of Aesop’s Animal Fables” ISBN: |
An Orthographic Analysis |
|
Hamza analysed the word in this way: tantalizing → tantal + ize + ing While his mum and I agreed with his word sum, the problem lay in that we were unable to come up with very many other words that we knew of that used that base element. So we went to the books. John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins explained why we had had so much difficulty—the word is an eponym which had come into use in English during the 16th century. As such it did not have to comply to the laws of English orthography, in fact its spelling gave no clues at all to its denotation. We needed to know the story of Tantalus for that. |
The Story of Tantalus |
|
To tantalize is to tease or disappoint by promising something desirable and then withholding it or, as Dr. Johnson put it, “to torment by the show of pleasures that cannot be reached.” The legendary King Tantalus divulged to mortals the secrets of the gods, which had been entrusted to him by Zeus. In another version, he cooked his son Pelops and served him to the gods. He was thereupon condemned to an eternal and peculiar punishment. |
|
Forced to stand in the underworld in a pool of clear water, Tantalus was forbidden to drink or to eat. Every time he bent down to slake his thirst, the waters of Hades receded from him. A tree with clusters of luscious fruit hung just above his head. But every time he extended his hand, he found that the fruit was just out of reach. Tantalus suffered agony from thirst, hunger and unfulfilled anticipation. Excerpt from “A New Dictionary of Eponyms” |
|
The dictionaries helped us too, particularly with confirming the base element. We found that the base <tantal> has been used scientifically for rocks and metals. |
|
We did not include these words in our matrix as they are not in everyday use. However, during our investigations we did discover that the word tantalus itself came into use in English in the 19th century to denote “a case in which bottles may be locked with their contents tantalizingly visible.” An excellent word indeed for it. |
|
A tantalus |
|
Click on the illustration to find out more. |