The Hippo in the Room

Over the years, one sees the mauling of language at every level. Sometimes, this is part of the natural progression of things. Shakespeare spelt his own name many different ways, and if he were to spell 'theatre' at all, he spelt it 'theater'. In fact, the way Americans spell English words is often a snapshot of the way things were spelt in the 17th century, before the insidious pseudo-Classicism of the language by the clueless Brits took place.

It's quite clear, for example, that 'colour' is an awkward hybrid of 'color' and 'couleur'. That awkwardness stems from the fact that the Brits never seemed quite clear on how to transliterate Greek and Latin. The development of Latin into Romanian, Italian and Spanish offers some clues, which of course the world-spanning Imperials overlooked.

That legacy of linguistic neglect has come down to haunt us in a time when people can't tell the difference between Hippocrates, hypocrisy, and hypocracy. They all sound equally hip.

But the Greek hippos means 'horse'; a hippopotamos is a 'horse of the river'. Hippocrates actually means something like 'horsepower' (haha, cue private in-joke). The name 'Philip', from Greek phil- + hippos means 'lover of horses'.

The Greek hüpo- means 'under'. 'Hypocrisy' comes from the Greek hüpo- + krinesthai, 'to give answer (or make decision) underneath' (i.e. to speak in secret, metaphorically). The term actually came to mean 'to act on a stage', which stresses the overt part of performance instead of the underlying, covert nature. Some people who can't spell or with an odd idea of Greek use the spelling 'hypocracy'. This would literally mean 'underauthority' or 'the authority of whatever is underneath'. Haha.