It's scarily amazing how people can so readily accept a word without finding out what it means, just because it sounds cool. im referring specifically to the name that Ignis will be using for orientation 2010 - Ixion. i have to admit that my first reaction was very sheeple-like; after all, it's got an "X" in it and an "io"-sound! come on, all the cool words are like that - axe, extreme, axiom... the ignis blog says that ixion is the "greek god of fiery", but as usual i wasnt statisfied without doing a little research of my own - after all, being a god of "fiery" isnt even grammatically correct to begin with -.- to my horror and disappointment, i discovered that ixion was a man with far greater problems than just bad grammar.
for starters, notice that i used "man" instead of "god". yup, ixion was all mortal. and not only that, he was a pretty horrible example of a man. his first sin was that he married a woman and then tried to worm his way out of the bride price that he had previously agreed on (cheapskate -.-). no matter, the father-in-law took care of it by stealing his entire herd of horses (it seems like in ancient greece, everyone has a herd of something - cows, sheep, horses, whatever) and keeping them hostage until he pays up. being the scrooge to the end, ixion invited his father-in-law to a meal at his house, then pushes him into a pit of flaming coal (yup, because everyone has a pit of flaming coal lying around the house). his being the first case of murdering a family member that ancient greece has ever seen, none of the gods were willing to forgive him and he became sort of like a wandering ghost until zeus took pity on him and invited him to Mt Olympus for the cleansing ritual. still the dumbass ingrate that he is, ixion tried to seduce hera, and zeus caught him red-handed by using a cloud shaped like hera to bait him (extra: afterwards, the cloud actually gave birth to a bunch of centaurs; man + cloud = half-man-half-horse?). in short, ixion is the furthest you could get from being god of anything, but it just so happens that his name translates to "fiery", and zeus punished him by tying him to a flaming wheel for eternity.
the whole point of this greek mythology lesson is that i find it interesting, perhaps slightly worrying, that people are willing to so easily forsake the original meaning of a word for the sake of "it sounds cool". another example comes from Harry Potter. there's this one spell, enervate, which has the effect of restoring energy, but the word itself comes from a latin phrase meaning "to drain energy", which in case you havent noticed is a complete 180 degree turn in usage. this phenomenon is more commonly seen with vulgarities, like how f*** used to mean strictly fornication but now can be substituted for any noun, verb or adjective (i challenge you to find another word that can do that). of course a language must be given room to evolve on its own, but where is the line between acceptable expansion of the language and blindly accepting any random twist in usage of a word or phrase?
on a lighter note, it seems that Ignis is not the only one which made a mistake like this. Terra made a smaller, though still funny, mistake in choosing their orientation name, Tellus. in roman mythology, tellus is an alternate name for Terra (surprise?), the goddess of the earth. however, orientation 2010 names all have a greek theme, and there is a Tellus in greek mythology, but he's a lot less grand as tellus of rome - tellus was the mythical "happiest man alive", a resident of athens who supposedly was happy over everything. so... a sinner forever punished, and a man with a permanent smile. orientation looks interesting already :)
