Carnal Knowledge A Navel Gazer's Dictionary of Anatomy, Etymology, and Trivia

Chapter One Annulary Your annulary is your ring finger. The word comes from the Latin annulus, meaning "ring." Annulary entered English in 1623 from a French translation of The theatre of honour and knighthood; or, a compendious chronicle and historie of the whole Christian world, by Andrew Favine. This same document tells us that this same finger was once called the "physician finger," from the Latin digitus medicus, and that it was also called the "leech finger," since doctors were known as "leeches" before they were called "physicians." Curiously, both doctors who drew blood and creepy little blood-sucking invertebrates were known as "leeches" from since around the year 900, yet quite probably each came to this name from different root words. The phrase "physician finger" came about because the ring finger was thought to be home to a particularly good vein for bloodletting, one that communicated directly with the heart. If you possess visible veins on the back of your hand, you will notice that one of the most obvious ones does line up roughly with the ring finger. The supposed association between the heart and this finger is the reason that it is the finger we honor with our wedding rings. Apollo In palm reading, the ring finger is associated with the Greek god Apollo and is supposed to signify generosity and sense of self. A ring finger that is too long is believed to indicate a feeling of superiority that leads to interpersonal conflict; too short a ring finger is supposed to indicate a lack of trust in others. Apollo was a good-looking god but not a very steadfast one. For instance, having kidnapped and seduced (today we might call it "raped") a young Athenian princess named Creusa, he then abandoned her and the child she bore himdespite the fact that Apollo's sister Artemis was supposed to be the special protector of young women. Then again, in those days it was pretty common for gods to act like total inconsiderate jerks even while they were performing miraculous acts such as seeing into the future or slaying giant magic pythons. In spite of Apollo's bad conduct, today the term Apollonian means "harmonious and well-balanced." arm In his book The Mother Tongue, Bill Bryson explains that many words in Old English (also called "Anglo-Saxon") were pushed into obsolescence by Norse and Norman words during the first thousand years of the development of English. He estimates that only about 1 percent of the words contained in The OED are from that original Old English stock but asserts that these surviving words are the most fundamental in the language. Arm is one of them. It goes back to Old English, first appearing circa 950 in the Lindisfarne Gospels, arguably one of the most beautiful documents in existence. (See breast, pp. 13637.) The relevant line reads, "He onfeng him on armum his," which is to say, "He took him up in his arms," referring to Simeon's recognition of the baby Jesus as the Messiah. Leonardo da Vinci (14521519) created a famous sketch, known as the Vitruvian Man, showing that the spread of people's arms almost exactly equals their height. The name came from the fact that the first recorded observation of this relationship occurred in a book on architecture by the Roman Marcus Vitruvius Pollio (circa 90 to 20 BCE). The word arm reaches back to an Indo-European root meaning "join" or "fit together." The same root led to arm in a military sense. One English-Latin dictionary lists sixty-three entries containHodgson, Charles is the author of 'Carnal Knowledge A Navel Gazer's Dictionary of Anatomy, Etymology, and Trivia', published 2007 under ISBN 9780312371210 and ISBN 0312371217.