Word of the Day: Autochthon

This is an interesting word. It is guaranteed to cause fits to Hangman players and players of other games who are taken unawares. Such players, trawling for vowels, will go through A, E and I before discovering the paucity thereof; on going doggedly onwards to O and U, they will find a rather unsettling distribution in the second part. What four consonants could those be, between the two Os?

But lexically, autochthon comes from the Greek auton, 'a thing itself' and chthonios, 'of the earth'. It denotes an entity which comes from where it is found. What? That's it? Yes, well... the Latin equivalent is aborigine, which means 'from the origin(al place)'.

The opposite of 'Chthonian' is 'Olympian'; that is, Chthonian is to Olympian as Earth is to Air, or as plebeian is to aristocrat – or symbolically, as hammer is to thunderbolt. That, of course, resonates with symbols from many places and cultures. I leave you to think about such resonances on your own.