10 Beautiful Words You Don’t Know
There are lots of words that mean or imply “beautiful.” Here’s a list pulled from a thesaurus:
adonic, adorable, aesthetic, alluring, attractive, becoming, blooming, bonny, bright, charming, classy, comely, dainty, dapper, dazzling, delicate, elegant, enchanting, exquisite, fair, fascinating, fine, glamorous, glossy, glowing, gorgeous, graceful, handsome, lovely, magnificent, picturesque, pretty, quaint, refined, resplendent, rosy, seemly, shapely, shining, sparkling, splendid, spotless, spruce, stylish, sublime, superb, svelte, winsome.
My guess is you know these words and their derivatives. But there are others. Consider the following ten words – all of which relate to beauty. The odds are that you’ve not met with them before, unless you’re a committed kalologist.
1. Orchidaceous: Orchidaceous means “like an orchid,” and since orchids are widely regarded as beautiful, it implies exceptional beautiful. But the word is used in other contexts too. It can imply “ostentatious” or even “gaudy”, which fits the appearance of some orchids too, depending on your taste. Indeed, some orchids are, to be quite honest, very much plain-Jane.
As it happens, orchids constitute the largest family of flowering plants there is. There are well over 20,000 naturally occurring species, before you get to the numerous hybrids. They grow just about everywhere on dry land. The tallest orchid variety known to man (that isn’t a vine), called grammatophyllum speciosum, can reach 25 feet in height and has leaves up to 2.5 feet long. It has a flower stalk that can bear 100 flowers and grow to 8 feet. I’d say that was ostentatious, although as I’ve never seen an exemplar, I can’t attest to gaudiness.
Orchid’s are weird indeed, as almost each variety (the vast majority of cases) can only be pollinated by a specific insect or bird, making it highly dependent on its symbiote for survival. They laugh in the general direction of Darwin. How could it be that the most prolific flower of all would choose such a fragile existence. Orchid varieties are peculiarly susceptible to extinction. They die out if the bird or insect they depend on vanishes from their ecosystem.
The word “orchid” derives directly from the Greek “orkhis” which means testicle, and probably refers to the shape of an orchid’s root (for some orchid varieties). The oddly shaped root may explain why orchids were used in ancient and medieval times as aphrodisiacs.
2. Amaranthine. This word is also Greek in origin, from “amarantos” meaning everlasting – literally, not wasting away. The amaranth was, mythically speaking, a flower that grew on Mount Olympus and a symbol of immortality, sacred to Ephesian Artemis.
Aesop tells an endearing story of a conversation between the Rose and the Amaranth, with the Amaranth envying the beauty and sweet scent of the the rose, but the Rose lamenting that “I bloom but for a time, and my petals wither and I die. But your flowers never fade, even when cut; for they are eternal.”
All of which is charming if taken as myth, but a little wide of the actualité. Amaranth is the common name for the Amaranthaceae, known also as pigweed, which sounds a little south of eternally beautiful – although, in its favor, it is believed to have healing properties. In fact there are about 70 species of Amaranth, quite a few of which grow in India, a thousand miles or more from Mount Olympus.
–~~~~~~~~~~~~–
The globe amaranth is known as the bachelor’s button. You’ve probably encountered the feathery amaranth, also known as as cockscomb or celosia, with its plume-like flowers that range in color from dark crimson to golden yellow. You see them in flower shops. Oddly they are annuals – not even perennials, which is strange for a supposedly eternal flower.
3. Kalopsia. Kalopsia is the delusion that things are more beautiful than they really are. The immortality that Aesop’s Rose craves may not be as beautiful as the Rose imagines. Certainly Jonathan Swift would dispute the suggestion – and he did, in Gulliver’s Travels (the unexpurgated version). On his travels, Swift’s Gulliver hears mention of the Struldbruggs, and is told that:
“sometimes, though very rarely, a child happened to be born in a family with a red circular spot in the forehead, directly over the left eyebrow, which was an infallible mark that it should never die.”
Gulliver expresses his happiness for those “excellent Struldbruggs, who born exempt from that universal calamity of human nature, have their minds free and disengaged, without the weight and depression of spirits caused by the continual apprehension of death.”
He is, however, soon corrected of this misapprehension..
“…the same gentleman who had been my interpreter said, he was desired by the rest to set me right in a few mistakes… he gave me a particular account of the Struldbruggs among them. He said they commonly acted like mortals, till about thirty years old, after which by degrees they grew melancholy and dejected…When they came to four-score years, which is reckoned the extremity of living in this country, they had not only all the follies and infirmities of other old men, but many more which arose from the dreadful prospects of never dying.”
So much for immortality…
4. Colposinquanonia. ”Handsome is as handsome does,” is an old saw that my mother trotted out with depressign regularlity. A pleasant exterior does not presage an inner purity, but nevertheless, the male forever assesses the female on the basis of exterior qualities; beauty in face and body. In my student days I participated in late night intellectual debates about the essense of female beauty.
One wag from our intellectual clique, provocatively denied the beauty of female breasts with the bald words “Tits are ugly.” He was studying Law at the time and was an effective debater. He argued tenaciously that breasts of themselves had no specific aesthetic attributes. “Just imagine a diembodied tit, sitting right there on the coffee table!” he challenged. Of course we all did, and I confess that, for me at least, the vision failed to appeal in any way.
Nevertheless, until that moment, I had always tended to colposinquanonia – estimating a woman’s beauty, to some degree, according to the aesthetic appeal of her natural pectoral adornments. So the polemic threw me into a mild confusion. It flew in the face of other long but far less academic discussions I had had on whether to assess a woman’s beauty according to her legs or her breasts.
–~~~~~~~~~~~~–
5. Kalokagathia. Despite that male tendency, quite a few women do not like being admired for their form. I was accused once, by a rather appealing philologist, of oculoplania. She was interested in the intellectual to-and-fro between us. I was – guilty as charged – interested in her breasts. In my defense those breasts would not have attracted me so much had she not dressed to reveal rather than conceal. I suspect she had dressed that evening with the specific intention of introducing “ocuplania” into a conversation with a man.
Ocuplania means “letting one’s eyes wander while assessing someone’s charms” and since that’s the only definition I can find (it’s a rare word) I’m not really sure of what it implies. I can only assume that the word is Victorian and designed to stop a man looking directly at a woman’s breasts even if she thrusts them into his face.
Events demonstrate that I am infected with oculoplania when sufficiently provoked. But no matter what my unruly eyes do, kalokagathia is what impresses me most. Beneath it all, I am programmed to search for a combination of the good and the beautiful in a person. That’s kalokagathia.
6. Euonym. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, it’s true, but if it’s called pigweed, it just doesn’t give the right impression. Names are adverts of a kind, so it’s easy to understand why people in the public eye are wont to change their names when their original name is less than inviting. You could be forgiven for believing you have you’ve no knowledge of any of this list of people:
Alfredo Cocozza, Ehrich Weiss, Rudolpho D’Antonguolla, Asa Yoelson, Arthur Jefferson, William Claude Dukenfield, Frances Gumm, Harlean Carpentier, Laszio Lowenstein, Emmanuel Goldenberg, Virginia McMath, Nathan Birnbaum, Archibald Leach, Walter Palanuik, William Henry Pratt, David Kaminsky, Leonard Slye, Margarita Cansino, Marion Michael Morrison, Issur Danielovitch, Mary Kaumeyer, Betty Joan Perske, Charles Carter, Roy Scherer Jr., Ruby Stevens, Walden Robert Cassotto, Reginald Carey, Bernard Schwartz, Seth Ward, Joe Yule Jr., Vera Jane Palmer, Joseph Levitch, Allen Konigsberg, Camille Javal, Louis Lindley, Michael Shalhoub, Maurice Micklewhite, Raquel Tejada, Susan Kerr Wells, Jerome Silberman, Cherilyn Sarkisian, Leslie Hornby, Alphonso D’Abruzzo, Walter Willison, Krishna Banji, Thomas Mapother IV, Caryn Johnson, Terry Jene Bollea, Margaret Mary Emily Anne Hyra, Kevin John Fowler, Sylvester Gardenzio and Annie Mae Bullock.
In fact you’ve heard of most, if not all of them, by the names they adopted. They are, in the same order as the previous list:
Mario Lanza, Harry Houdini, Rudolph Valentino, Al Jolson, Stan Laurel, W.C. Fields, Judy Garland, Jean Harlow, Peter Lorre, Edward G. Robinson, Ginger Rogers, George Burns, Cary Grant, Jack Palance, Boris Karloff, Danny Kaye, Roy Rogers, Rita Hayworth, John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, Dorothy Lamour, Lauren Bacall, Charlton Heston, Rock Hudson, Barbara Stanwyck, Bobby Darin, Rex Harrison, Tony Curtis, Jimmy Dean, Mickey Rooney, Jayne Mansfield, Jerry Lewis, Woody Allen, Brigitte Bardot, Slim Pickens, Omar Sharif, Michael Caine, Raquel Welch, Tuesday Weld, Gene Wilder, Cher, Twiggy, Alan Alda, Bruce Willis, Ben Kingsley, Tom Cruise, Whoopie Goldberg, Hulk Hogan, Meg Ryan, Kevin Spacey, Sylvester Stallone and Tina Turner.
You can make your own judgment as to whether these chosen names qualify as euonyms. A euonym is a beautiful name – or at least a good, proper, or fitting name – for something or someone.
–~~~~~~~~~~~~–
7. Callipygous. Arguably, the ultimate question of life is: “Does my ass look big in this?” Sadly the answer to the question varies from era to era and from culture to culture. Nowadays, in fashion circles, the sylph-like figure dominates and hence women arrange for their buttocks to look less prominent. Sadly, it’s complicated. Sylphs are great for hanging clothes on, because the clothes hang from them rather than cling to them. However, sylph-like buttocks are generally insufficient in another important context. For decades, women have worn stilletto heels to emphasize their buttocks, well aware of the fact that curvy buttocks are attractive, especially when in motion. Stillettos are specifically designed to emphasize buttocks and to damage flooring.
According to reports, Marylyn Monroe even had her stiletto heels adjusted, so that one heel was shorter than the other. This ensured that her buttocks always swayed to and fro when she walked. In truth, her body needed little assistance as she had the fashionable hourglass shape of her era.
Nowadays her clothes size would be regarded as a little North of perfection. That is, unless she were a Hottentot woman, in which case she would be regarded as excessively thin and unappealing. The Hottentot male much prefers women with excessive fat deposits in the buttocks. He’s not alone, of course, the tendency among primitive tribes pretty much everywhere is to prefer the plumper woman.
If you haven’t guessed it by the way, callypigous means having beautiful buttocks, the beauty being seated firmly in the eye of the beholder.
8. Calligyniaphobia. A misoscopist is a hater of beauty, which seems almost paradoxical. Nevertheless the word exists, so we can only presume that there are those to whom it applies. If so they are likely to suffer from calligyniaphobia, which means “the fear of beautiful women.”
But why should we fear beautiful women? The beautiful exterior can harbor an evil interior as was the case with the evil queens in the classic fairy tales “Snow White” and “Sleeping Beauty.” If you’re looking for examples of such in history then perhaps the following qualify:
* Delilah, who brought blindness and death to Samson
* Livia, the beautiful wife of Caesar Augustus and reputedly his poisoner.
* Salome, who requested and recevied the head of John The Baptist as a gift.
* Lucretia Borgia, like Livia, a poisoner by reputation and married to various noblemen in 15th/16th century Italy. She was accused of incest (with her brothers and her father, Pope Alexander VI) and had the distinction of being declared a virgin by the Vatican after she had had a baby.
To this list we could also add women who themselves were not evil but whose influence provoked war. Helen of Troy and Cleopatra are the principal examples. But it’s a digression that doesn’t amount to a hill of beautiful beans really. As a psychological term calligyniaphobia is about shyness and fear of rejection. Most men are programmed to be attracted to beautiful women, but some have not the courage for their pursuit. Actually there’s another word with exactly the same meaning; venustraphobia.
9. Callomania. Where there’s a phobia, there’s bound to be a mania, but before we get into that, by now you should be suspecting that the prefix “cal” has something to do with beauty. It does. The Greek adjective kalon means “good, fine, noble and beautiful.” So, you may wonder whether the name “California” has an etymological link to “kalon.” The answer is “maybe.”
–~~~~~~~~~~~~–
In 1510, Garci Ordóñez de Montalvo, published a book entitled Las sergas de Esplandián (Exploits of Espladán) a sequel to his New York Times best seller Amadis de Gaula, which was the “Harry Potter” of its day, translated into many other languages, even Hebrew. Everyone read it, even Henry of Navarre and St Ignatius of Loyola. Cervantes referred to it in his writings, having a barber describe it as “the best of all books of this kind.” If was a fantasy about knights, damsels, dragons, giants, wizards and such. The sequel was also widely read, and in it you find references to an imaginary island realm called “California” ruled over by Queen Califia. Let me quote:
To the West of the Indies is an island called California very close to a side of the Earthly Paradise; and it is populated by black women, without any men existing there. They live in the way of the Amazons. They have beautiful and athletic bodies, and are brave and strong. Their island is a fortress with cliffs and rocky shores. Their weapons are golden and so too the harnesses of the wild beasts that they ride, for there is no other metal in that island than gold.
Las sergas de Esplandián was published at the time that Spanish explorers were heading West in considerable numbers hoping to conquer new lands and return with gold. It is suspected that when some such Spaniards reached the Western shores of what is now Mexico and headed North they discovered Baja California, which they guessed to be an island (not having made their way far enough North to realize that it was just a peninsula) and they named it California, even though it was short on black Amazon women in general and gold in particular. Of course if they’d continued North they might have actually found the gold that sparked the California gold rush of 1849. But they didn’t. It wasn’t until 1785 that anyone used the word California to denote that general area in a written record.
How Montalvo came up with the name “California is a complete mystery. It is possible that he took the Greek kalon and mixed it with the Latin fornix meaning brothel, with the intended meaning of “beautiful brothel.” That is, of course, unwarranted speculation. But even if it’s correct, it doesn’t make Montalvo a callomaniac. A callomaniac is someone who’s deluded about their own beauty rather than someoen who’s deluded about the beauty of an imaginary island full of skantily-clan women that’s awash with gold.
10. Callisteia. Callisteia are prizes for beauty, named for the Greek goddess Callisto. When the Greeks have a concept they normally have some derivative god or goddess with a life story to hammer home the idea. In the case of beauty, the appropriate goddess is Callisto, “callistos” literally meaning “most beautiful.”
Callisto used to go hunting with her close friend and goddess, Artemis who was a bit of a tom boy and a virgin to boot; the goddess of the hunt and protectoress of youth. Callisto had promised Artemis that she too would remain a virgin. And she might have, had it not been for Zeus who was a wily seducer. He picked Callisto’s cherry by assuming the form of Artemis. Artemis and Calisto were presumably occasional visitors to the Isle of Lesbos, otherwise Callisto would surely have refused Zeus-disguised-as-Artemis.
Despite being brilliant in the art of seduction, Zeus was utterly useless at concealing his indiscretions from his wife Hera, who was as jealous as a cat and twice as vengeful. In order to protect Callisto, Zeus turned her into a bear. Hera, who was not fooled at all by the rather beautiful bear, let Artemis know that the bear was in fact Callisto, who was now one cherry short of the perfect trifle. Artemis shot her without hesitation.
Zeus, failing as usual to protect the victim of his seductive activities, promptly transformed her into Ursa Major (the constellation of the Great Bear) and placed her in a part of the Northern sky which never dips below the horizon of the Mediterranean sky. He thus made her eternal and immortal.
P.S. I’m sure you worked it out, but in case you didn’t, a kalologist is someone who studies beauty in all its dimensions.
There are lots of words that mean or imply “beautiful.” Here’s a list pulled from a thesaurus:
adonic, adorable, aesthetic, alluring, attractive, becoming, blooming, bonny, bright, charming, classy, comely, dainty, dapper, dazzling, delicate, elegant, enchanting, exquisite, fair, fascinating, fine, glamorous, glossy, glowing, gorgeous, graceful, handsome, lovely, magnificent, picturesque, pretty, quaint, refined, resplendent, rosy, seemly, shapely, shining, sparkling, splendid, spotless, spruce, stylish, sublime, superb, svelte, winsome.
My guess is you know these words and their derivatives. But there are others. Consider the following ten words – all of which relate to beauty. The odds are that you’ve not met with them before, unless you’re a committed kalologist.
1. Orchidaceous: Orchidaceous means “like an orchid,” and since orchids are widely regarded as beautiful, it implies exceptional beautiful. But the word is used in other contexts too. It can imply “ostentatious” or even “gaudy”, which fits the appearance of some orchids too, depending on your taste. Indeed, some orchids are, to be quite honest, very much plain-Jane.
As it happens, orchids constitute the largest family of flowering plants there is. There are well over 20,000 naturally occurring species, before you get to the numerous hybrids. They grow just about everywhere on dry land. The tallest orchid variety known to man (that isn’t a vine), called grammatophyllum speciosum, can reach 25 feet in height and has leaves up to 2.5 feet long. It has a flower stalk that can bear 100 flowers and grow to 8 feet. I’d say that was ostentatious, although as I’ve never seen an exemplar, I can’t attest to gaudiness.
Orchid’s are weird indeed, as almost each variety (the vast majority of cases) can only be pollinated by a specific insect or bird, making it highly dependent on its symbiote for survival. They laugh in the general direction of Darwin. How could it be that the most prolific flower of all would choose such a fragile existence. Orchid varieties are peculiarly susceptible to extinction. They die out if the bird or insect they depend on vanishes from their ecosystem.
The word “orchid” derives directly from the Greek “orkhis” which means testicle, and probably refers to the shape of an orchid’s root (for some orchid varieties). The oddly shaped root may explain why orchids were used in ancient and medieval times as aphrodisiacs.
2. Amaranthine. This word is also Greek in origin, from “amarantos” meaning everlasting – literally, not wasting away. The amaranth was, mythically speaking, a flower that grew on Mount Olympus and a symbol of immortality, sacred to Ephesian Artemis.
Aesop tells an endearing story of a conversation between the Rose and the Amaranth, with the Amaranth envying the beauty and sweet scent of the the rose, but the Rose lamenting that “I bloom but for a time, and my petals wither and I die. But your flowers never fade, even when cut; for they are eternal.”
All of which is charming if taken as myth, but a little wide of the actualité. Amaranth is the common name for the Amaranthaceae, known also as pigweed, which sounds a little south of eternally beautiful – although, in its favor, it is believed to have healing properties. In fact there are about 70 species of Amaranth, quite a few of which grow in India, a thousand miles or more from Mount Olympus.
–~~~~~~~~~~~~–
The globe amaranth is known as the bachelor’s button. You’ve probably encountered the feathery amaranth, also known as as cockscomb or celosia, with its plume-like flowers that range in color from dark crimson to golden yellow. You see them in flower shops. Oddly they are annuals – not even perennials, which is strange for a supposedly eternal flower.
3. Kalopsia. Kalopsia is the delusion that things are more beautiful than they really are. The immortality that Aesop’s Rose craves may not be as beautiful as the Rose imagines. Certainly Jonathan Swift would dispute the suggestion – and he did, in Gulliver’s Travels (the unexpurgated version). On his travels, Swift’s Gulliver hears mention of the Struldbruggs, and is told that:
“sometimes, though very rarely, a child happened to be born in a family with a red circular spot in the forehead, directly over the left eyebrow, which was an infallible mark that it should never die.”
Gulliver expresses his happiness for those “excellent Struldbruggs, who born exempt from that universal calamity of human nature, have their minds free and disengaged, without the weight and depression of spirits caused by the continual apprehension of death.”
He is, however, soon corrected of this misapprehension..
“…the same gentleman who had been my interpreter said, he was desired by the rest to set me right in a few mistakes… he gave me a particular account of the Struldbruggs among them. He said they commonly acted like mortals, till about thirty years old, after which by degrees they grew melancholy and dejected…When they came to four-score years, which is reckoned the extremity of living in this country, they had not only all the follies and infirmities of other old men, but many more which arose from the dreadful prospects of never dying.”
4. Colposinquanonia. ”Handsome is as handsome does,” is an old saw that my mother trotted out with depressign regularlity. A pleasant exterior does not presage an inner purity, but nevertheless, the male forever assesses the female on the basis of exterior qualities; beauty in face and body. In my student days I participated in late night intellectual debates about the essense of female beauty.
One wag from our intellectual clique, provocatively denied the beauty of female breasts with the bald words “Tits are ugly.” He was studying Law at the time and was an effective debater. He argued tenaciously that breasts of themselves had no specific aesthetic attributes. “Just imagine a diembodied tit, sitting right there on the coffee table!” he challenged. Of course we all did, and I confess that, for me at least, the vision failed to appeal in any way.
Nevertheless, until that moment, I had always tended to colposinquanonia – estimating a woman’s beauty, to some degree, according to the aesthetic appeal of her natural pectoral adornments. So the polemic threw me into a mild confusion. It flew in the face of other long but far less academic discussions I had had on whether to assess a woman’s beauty according to her legs or her breasts.
–~~~~~~~~~~~~–
5. Kalokagathia. Despite that male tendency, quite a few women do not like being admired for their form. I was accused once, by a rather appealing philologist, of oculoplania. She was interested in the intellectual to-and-fro between us. I was – guilty as charged – interested in her breasts. In my defense those breasts would not have attracted me so much had she not dressed to reveal rather than conceal. I suspect she had dressed that evening with the specific intention of introducing “ocuplania” into a conversation with a man.
Ocuplania means “letting one’s eyes wander while assessing someone’s charms” and since that’s the only definition I can find (it’s a rare word) I’m not really sure of what it implies. I can only assume that the word is Victorian and designed to stop a man looking directly at a woman’s breasts even if she thrusts them into his face.
Events demonstrate that I am infected with oculoplania when sufficiently provoked. But no matter what my unruly eyes do, kalokagathia is what impresses me most. Beneath it all, I am programmed to search for a combination of the good and the beautiful in a person. That’s kalokagathia.
6. Euonym. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, it’s true, but if it’s called pigweed, it just doesn’t give the right impression. Names are adverts of a kind, so it’s easy to understand why people in the public eye are wont to change their names when their original name is less than inviting. You could be forgiven for believing you have you’ve no knowledge of any of this list of people:
Alfredo Cocozza, Ehrich Weiss, Rudolpho D’Antonguolla, Asa Yoelson, Arthur Jefferson, William Claude Dukenfield, Frances Gumm, Harlean Carpentier, Laszio Lowenstein, Emmanuel Goldenberg, Virginia McMath, Nathan Birnbaum, Archibald Leach, Walter Palanuik, William Henry Pratt, David Kaminsky, Leonard Slye, Margarita Cansino, Marion Michael Morrison, Issur Danielovitch, Mary Kaumeyer, Betty Joan Perske, Charles Carter, Roy Scherer Jr., Ruby Stevens, Walden Robert Cassotto, Reginald Carey, Bernard Schwartz, Seth Ward, Joe Yule Jr., Vera Jane Palmer, Joseph Levitch, Allen Konigsberg, Camille Javal, Louis Lindley, Michael Shalhoub, Maurice Micklewhite, Raquel Tejada, Susan Kerr Wells, Jerome Silberman, Cherilyn Sarkisian, Leslie Hornby, Alphonso D’Abruzzo, Walter Willison, Krishna Banji, Thomas Mapother IV, Caryn Johnson, Terry Jene Bollea, Margaret Mary Emily Anne Hyra, Kevin John Fowler, Sylvester Gardenzio and Annie Mae Bullock.
In fact you’ve heard of most, if not all of them, by the names they adopted. They are, in the same order as the previous list:
Mario Lanza, Harry Houdini, Rudolph Valentino, Al Jolson, Stan Laurel, W.C. Fields, Judy Garland, Jean Harlow, Peter Lorre, Edward G. Robinson, Ginger Rogers, George Burns, Cary Grant, Jack Palance, Boris Karloff, Danny Kaye, Roy Rogers, Rita Hayworth, John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, Dorothy Lamour, Lauren Bacall, Charlton Heston, Rock Hudson, Barbara Stanwyck, Bobby Darin, Rex Harrison, Tony Curtis, Jimmy Dean, Mickey Rooney, Jayne Mansfield, Jerry Lewis, Woody Allen, Brigitte Bardot, Slim Pickens, Omar Sharif, Michael Caine, Raquel Welch, Tuesday Weld, Gene Wilder, Cher, Twiggy, Alan Alda, Bruce Willis, Ben Kingsley, Tom Cruise, Whoopie Goldberg, Hulk Hogan, Meg Ryan, Kevin Spacey, Sylvester Stallone and Tina Turner.
You can make your own judgment as to whether these chosen names qualify as euonyms. A euonym is a beautiful name – or at least a good, proper, or fitting name – for something or someone.
–~~~~~~~~~~~~–
7. Callipygous. Arguably, the ultimate question of life is: “Does my ass look big in this?” Sadly the answer to the question varies from era to era and from culture to culture. Nowadays, in fashion circles, the sylph-like figure dominates and hence women arrange for their buttocks to look less prominent. Sadly, it’s complicated. Sylphs are great for hanging clothes on, because the clothes hang from them rather than cling to them. However, sylph-like buttocks are generally insufficient in another important context. For decades, women have worn stilletto heels to emphasize their buttocks, well aware of the fact that curvy buttocks are attractive, especially when in motion. Stillettos are specifically designed to emphasize buttocks and to damage flooring.
According to reports, Marylyn Monroe even had her stiletto heels adjusted, so that one heel was shorter than the other. This ensured that her buttocks always swayed to and fro when she walked. In truth, her body needed little assistance as she had the fashionable hourglass shape of her era.
Nowadays her clothes size would be regarded as a little North of perfection. That is, unless she were a Hottentot woman, in which case she would be regarded as excessively thin and unappealing. The Hottentot male much prefers women with excessive fat deposits in the buttocks. He’s not alone, of course, the tendency among primitive tribes pretty much everywhere is to prefer the plumper woman.
If you haven’t guessed it by the way, callypigous means having beautiful buttocks, the beauty being seated firmly in the eye of the beholder.
8. Calligyniaphobia. A misoscopist is a hater of beauty, which seems almost paradoxical. Nevertheless the word exists, so we can only presume that there are those to whom it applies. If so they are likely to suffer from calligyniaphobia, which means “the fear of beautiful women.”
But why should we fear beautiful women? The beautiful exterior can harbor an evil interior as was the case with the evil queens in the classic fairy tales “Snow White” and “Sleeping Beauty.” If you’re looking for examples of such in history then perhaps the following qualify:
* Delilah, who brought blindness and death to Samson
* Livia, the beautiful wife of Caesar Augustus and reputedly his poisoner.
* Salome, who requested and recevied the head of John The Baptist as a gift.
* Lucretia Borgia, like Livia, a poisoner by reputation and married to various noblemen in 15th/16th century Italy. She was accused of incest (with her brothers and her father, Pope Alexander VI) and had the distinction of being declared a virgin by the Vatican after she had had a baby.
To this list we could also add women who themselves were not evil but whose influence provoked war. Helen of Troy and Cleopatra are the principal examples. But it’s a digression that doesn’t amount to a hill of beautiful beans really. As a psychological term calligyniaphobia is about shyness and fear of rejection. Most men are programmed to be attracted to beautiful women, but some have not the courage for their pursuit. Actually there’s another word with exactly the same meaning; venustraphobia.
9. Callomania. Where there’s a phobia, there’s bound to be a mania, but before we get into that, by now you should be suspecting that the prefix “cal” has something to do with beauty. It does. The Greek adjective kalon means “good, fine, noble and beautiful.” So, you may wonder whether the name “California” has an etymological link to “kalon.” The answer is “maybe.”
–~~~~~~~~~~~~–
In 1510, Garci Ordóñez de Montalvo, published a book entitled Las sergas de Esplandián (Exploits of Espladán) a sequel to his New York Times best seller Amadis de Gaula, which was the “Harry Potter” of its day, translated into many other languages, even Hebrew. Everyone read it, even Henry of Navarre and St Ignatius of Loyola. Cervantes referred to it in his writings, having a barber describe it as “the best of all books of this kind.” If was a fantasy about knights, damsels, dragons, giants, wizards and such. The sequel was also widely read, and in it you find references to an imaginary island realm called “California” ruled over by Queen Califia. Let me quote:
To the West of the Indies is an island called California very close to a side of the Earthly Paradise; and it is populated by black women, without any men existing there. They live in the way of the Amazons. They have beautiful and athletic bodies, and are brave and strong. Their island is a fortress with cliffs and rocky shores. Their weapons are golden and so too the harnesses of the wild beasts that they ride, for there is no other metal in that island than gold.
Las sergas de Esplandián was published at the time that Spanish explorers were heading West in considerable numbers hoping to conquer new lands and return with gold. It is suspected that when some such Spaniards reached the Western shores of what is now Mexico and headed North they discovered Baja California, which they guessed to be an island (not having made their way far enough North to realize that it was just a peninsula) and they named it California, even though it was short on black Amazon women in general and gold in particular. Of course if they’d continued North they might have actually found the gold that sparked the California gold rush of 1849. But they didn’t. It wasn’t until 1785 that anyone used the word California to denote that general area in a written record.
How Montalvo came up with the name “California is a complete mystery. It is possible that he took the Greek kalon and mixed it with the Latin fornix meaning brothel, with the intended meaning of “beautiful brothel.” That is, of course, unwarranted speculation. But even if it’s correct, it doesn’t make Montalvo a callomaniac. A callomaniac is someone who’s deluded about their own beauty rather than someoen who’s deluded about the beauty of an imaginary island full of skantily-clan women that’s awash with gold.
10. Callisteia. Callisteia are prizes for beauty, named for the Greek goddess Callisto. When the Greeks have a concept they normally have some derivative god or goddess with a life story to hammer home the idea. In the case of beauty, the appropriate goddess is Callisto, “callistos” literally meaning “most beautiful.”
Callisto used to go hunting with her close friend and goddess, Artemis who was a bit of a tom boy and a virgin to boot; the goddess of the hunt and protectoress of youth. Callisto had promised Artemis that she too would remain a virgin. And she might have, had it not been for Zeus who was a wily seducer. He picked Callisto’s cherry by assuming the form of Artemis. Artemis and Calisto were presumably occasional visitors to the Isle of Lesbos, otherwise Callisto would surely have refused Zeus-disguised-as-Artemis.
Despite being brilliant in the art of seduction, Zeus was utterly useless at concealing his indiscretions from his wife Hera, who was as jealous as a cat and twice as vengeful. In order to protect Callisto, Zeus turned her into a bear. Hera, who was not fooled at all by the rather beautiful bear, let Artemis know that the bear was in fact Callisto, who was now one cherry short of the perfect trifle. Artemis shot her without hesitation.
Zeus, failing as usual to protect the victim of his seductive activities, promptly transformed her into Ursa Major (the constellation of the Great Bear) and placed her in a part of the Northern sky which never dips below the horizon of the Mediterranean sky. He thus made her eternal and immortal.
P.S. I’m sure you worked it out, but in case you didn’t, a kalologist is someone who studies beauty in all its dimensions.