I have gotten into one of my mythological moods today (no no, not in love with alliteration or anything)…it must be the HP 7 (Harry Potter and the deathly hallows, for the less enlightened) mania surrounding me. According to my friend’s Gmail inbox, the wordsmith’s word of the day (today) is Penelope. For many, the obvious connection is Tom Cruise’s ex but my mind screamed Greek! (This is where the mythology bit comes into the picture). I love my job simply because I love the English language. So what happens when myth meets English…for the likes of me, it’s glee!!! Before you start wondering where all this is going, I’ll quickly explain the prospect at which my mind screamed Greek, glee…whatever. It has something (everything, rather) to do with the phrase Penelope’s web.
Penelope was Odysseus’ faithful wife [worthy of a mention in Greek mythology, considering the lecherous and promiscuous ways of the Hellenic Gods] who developed a particular strategy to remain married to her husband while he was away at war [The Trojan War]. Most doubted whether Odysseus was still alive, and they declared it highly improbable that he would ever return. Penelope was thus relentlessly sought by numerous suitors for four years since the fall of Troy and after spurning each one of them day after day, she finally had no alternative but to choose a husband from among them. A clever Penelope, however, employed every art in a bid to buy time, while secretly hoping for Odysseus’s return.
One such art involved engaging herself in the task of making (spinning) a shroud for the funeral canopy of Laertes, Odysseus’ father. She vowed that she would choose a suitor the day the shroud was completely spun (woven). She wove the fabric during the day only to unravel it during the night. Every night for three years, she undid part of the shroud, until her maidens discovered her trickery and revealed it to the suitors.
This is the famous Penelope’s web in the English language—a proverbial expression used to refer to something that is perpetually being done but is, in fact, never completed.
H.D.—the nom de plume of the American poet, novelist, and psychoanalyst Hilda Doolittle—said of her lifelong autobiographical project: “It must be Penelope’s web I’m weaving.”
The word “Penelope” is used as a noun to imply faithful and is an eponym of the aforementioned Greek heroine of the same name.
“O.K., so maybe nobody ever accused female chimpanzees of being the virtuous Penelopes of the forest. They’ve long been known to mate promiscuously, as have their male counterparts; after all, the genus name for chimpanzees, Pan, derives from the Greek god famed for his lechery.”- (Natalie Angier in Sex and the Female Chimp; The New York Times; May 27, 1997)
P.S. For the hopeless romantics, here’s the ending of the Odysseus–Penelope saga: they were reunited and did live happily ever after 😀
Trivial beginnings 