by Mary Norris
Z is still called zed in British English, probably a holdover from the Greek zeta. It is thanks to Noah Webster that Americans call it zee instead of zed. Webster knew a thing or two about alphabets—he studied dozens of languages before compiling the great American dictionary. He also knew about pedagogy—how to teach children—having started out as a schoolteacher; his first dictionary was conceived as a spelling aid for grammar schools. Webster would not have attempted to change the order of the alphabet—that would be madness—but he did suggest some improvements.
Rhyme makes things easier to memorize (zeta eta theta), and Webster thought it might better serve the cause of literacy to change the names of certain letters in the English alphabet. H (aitch) would more logically be called “he,” following the pattern of B, C, D, E, and representing its consonant sound. H has a convoluted history as a consonant. In Greek it’s a vowel, eta. The letter got broken down and its upper extremities were used to create breathing marks—rough (’) and smooth (‘)—that look like single quotation marks perched over initial vowels. And W (double U) is completely wrong: I remember looking at it in kindergarten and thinking, But that’s a double V. Webster wanted to simplify W by calling it “we.” (In ancient times, the Greek alphabet had the digamma for the sound of W, but it disappeared sometime after the fall of Troy and hasn’t been heard from since, except in remote scholarly regions—and among the Etruscans.) For similar reasons, Webster thought that Y (why) might better be called “yi.” What a nut. None of these innovations caught on, but by the time Webster got to the end of the alphabet he seems to have worn down the opposition. He succeeded in getting Americans to refer to the ultimate character as zee instead of zed.
Things that come first and last are in especially emphatic positions. In English, we use the expression A to Z to mean everything you need to know—about fashion, fundraising, sex—in a prescribed and predictable order. A theater critic might write that an actress “ran the gamut of emotions from A to Z,” meaning that by the end she was all out, empty, exhausted. Our alphabet runs out of steam. But the Greek alphabet is different. It ends not with a seldom-used consonant but with a big fat vowel: omega, big O, Ω, ω. Oh! Omega has energy in it, it has breath and inspiration. Omega sends you back to the vowel at the beginning, to the alpha, in a way that Z just doesn’t, and picks up overtones from the vowel in the middle, the omicron, or small O. The very shape of the omega is open at the end. The Greek alphabet, like Greek syntax, does not seem linear: it feels round. Nobody seriously translates “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” the words of the Almighty from the Book of Revelation, as “I am A through Z.” The Greek alphabet is infinite.
CHAPTER 2
A IS FOR ATHENA
MY FIRST EXPOSURE to Greek mythology was at the Lyceum—not the famed Lykeion in Athens, where Aristotle and his pupils strolled around as they discussed philosophy and beauty, but a movie theater on Fulton Road in Cleveland, where my brothers and I spent Saturday afternoons. The Lyceum was classic as opposed to classical: popcorn in red-and-white striped boxes, a stern lady usher who confiscated the candy we snuck in from outside, buzzers under the seats for a gimmicky thrill.
Every week, the Lyceum showed a double feature, usually a horror movie—The Mummy, Godzilla, The Creature from the Black Lagoon—paired with something mildly pornographic (and highly educational). At one Saturday matinee, I laid eyes for the first time on the Cyclops. The movie was Ulysses (1955 AD), starring Kirk Douglas as the man of many turnings. In a way, it, too, was a horror movie, full of monsters and appari tions: a witch who turned men into pigs, sea serpents, Anthony Quinn in a short tight skirt.
Ulysses is the Latinate name for Odysseus and the one preferred by Hollywood and James Joyce. How Odysseus became Ulysses is, like many things that happened between Greece and Rome, impossible to say for sure. Scholars have suggested that the “D,” or delta, of Odysseus in Ionic Greek was originally an “L,” or lambda, in the Dorian and Aeolic dialects. Delta (Δ) and lambda (Λ) are similar in form—a wedge with or without a bar—but to my knowledge no one has suggested that Odysseus was the ancient equivalent of a typo for Ulysses. The name may have reached Rome independently as Ulixes through Sicily, the traditional home of the Cyclops.
In Catania, a city under Mount Etna built largely of polished black lava, souvenir shops sell ceramic figurines of the Cyclops. The Cyclopes (plural) were a race of giants, similar to the Titans, clumsy prototypes for human beings. Polyphemus worked on Mount Etna, forging lightning bolts for Zeus. A friend from Catania told me some Sicilians believe that the Cyclops was Mount Etna, which erupted like Polyphemus’ eye after Odysseus poked it with a pointed stick, spewing into the sea stones that formed the Faraglioni di Acitrezza, dramatic stacked rocks in the Gulf of Catania. At any rate, one can imagine the story of the Cyclops going out into the world ahead of the epic poem, the way the Cyclops episode in the movie at the Lyceum preceded my knowledge of Homer. There is nothing like an old-fashioned Cyclops to get your attention.
Athena must have appeared in the movie—what is the Odyssey without Athena? She is the protector of Ulysses; he would not survive without her. Surely the hero invokes her—I must have heard her name. But I don’t recall meeting Homer’s gray-eyed goddess at the Lyceum. No tomes of mythology by Bulfinch, the d’Aulaires, or Edith Hamilton sat on the bookshelves in our house—in fact, there were no bookshelves in our house. But we had comic books and library cards, and I subsisted happily on the Brothers Grimm and Little Lulu. I did not, like a prodigy, read the Iliad in translation at fourteen. I had a weakness for the genre of the girl detective, for Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden. I also liked Poe and Dickens and Mark Twain and tried to read Hawthorne (yawn) and Sir Walter Scott (snore) and Dostoyevsky (coma). Anything I learned about Greek mythology was either absorbed through popular culture or through writers in English. In junior year at Lourdes Academy, the all-girls Catholic high school I attended in Cleveland, we read Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the lesson of which, according to Sister Diane Branski, was that though Joyce had lost his faith (and left Ireland), he could never get away from the Church (or Dublin). And neither would we.
Perhaps the spirit of Athena hovered over Lake Erie, but in those days—the fifties and sixties, when the twentieth century still felt like the future—my primary model, like that of most girls in the normal course of things, was my mother. She cooked, made the beds, swept the floor. She was a world-class talker—“Your mom sure has the gift of gab,” people would say—and she sang as she washed the dishes, songs like “Fascination” and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.” But to me washing the dishes was nothing to sing about. And while her example was powerful—as a nine-year-old, I fantasized about having a toy carpet sweeper—I was dubious about following in her footsteps. For one thing, she rarely went anywhere.
My mother and I were outnumbered by the males in the family, and I disliked being grouped with her. I felt housebound. I remember the taste of the front door, which I pressed my tongue against in my desperation to get outside—harsh cold glass in winter, bitter metallic screen in summer. I was always comparing my mother with other girls’ mothers, wishing to trade up. The nuns gave me models other than my mother, and I had an inkling that I might be popular in the convent. I liked the idea of changing my name—it would be a fresh start—but I worried about having to get up early, at the gong of a bell, and go to Mass every day. The convent was something to fall back on in case I didn’t get married. I had a feeling I wasn’t going to get married. But the nun’s life seemed just as circumscribed as my mother’s.
Once, for sixth-grade religion class, we were split into groups for a project on vocations. The nun handed out pamphlets describing what could be expected from each calling: you got married, you became a priest or a nun, or you remained single. I was put on the “single” panel. Remaining single did not feel like a choice—it was something you got stuck with, like the unmated card in a game of Old Maid. But the pamphlet pointed o
ut that although you might not choose it, if you were to die tomorrow—tragically, at age twelve—you would perforce be single. The only divine model the Church offered a girl was the Blessed Virgin Mary.
I suppose Athena became a model to me without my even realizing it: a third way. Athena, like Mary, is a virgin—parthéna—but she does not carry the paradoxical burden of maternity. She was born, fully formed and armed for battle, a warrior, from the head of Zeus. Her mother, by most accounts, was Metis, one of the Titans, rivals of the Olympians, meaning that Athena came from old stock. Because Metis wasn’t around (I am sorry to report that Zeus swallowed her while she was pregnant), Athena had none of the conflicts a girl has with her mother. She gets along well with Zeus’s wife, Hera, that most irritable of goddesses. Zeus never pressures her to marry.
Other women and girls may favor a different goddess. Many opt for Artemis, the huntress; someone who longs for children might identify with Demeter; great beauties are chosen by Aphrodite. Hera is not popular; in her Roman guise as Juno she is statuesque and confident, but what a bitch. For me, it had to be Athena. Whereas the Virgin Mary is a model of humility and servitude, Athena is the template for a liberated woman.
Athena is unfettered: she has no masculine deity to accom modate, no children to appease, no family obligations to juggle with her career. She is beholden to no one—Zeus treats her with respect and indulgence. Like a favorite daughter, she knows how to handle him. He trusts her judgment and lets her have her way. Her virginity may be one of the reasons Athenians chose her to be the patron of their city: she would be dedicated. The founding myth of Athens is that Athena and Poseidon were rivals for top honors in the city. Athena planted an olive tree on the Acropolis, and Poseidon caused salt water to spring up on its slopes. The gods judged the olive the greater gift and awarded the city to Athena.
Not that Athena doesn’t have domestic virtues: she is a weaver and a patron of the crafts, a civilizing influence. She’s not a fertility goddess, like Demeter and Artemis, but more of a survivor. Olive trees are legendarily resilient. Chop one down or burn it up, and new shoots grow from the stump. And Athena didn’t just plant that olive tree—someone had to impart the knowledge of how to cultivate it and how to press from its hard, bitter green fruit the precious essence of what the earth has to offer. Olive oil is an ingredient in everything from salads to shampoo, and the Greeks even used it as fuel, burning it in lamps. Athena seems to me to be the great example of using your resources wisely.
Most of all, Athena has tremendous feminine strength. In the Iliad, when Zeus lets the gods take up arms along with the mortals on the battlefield, Athena lays out Ares flat—Ares, the god of war! Athena can be terrifying. She wears the head of Medusa on her breast, at the center of her shield, or aegis. The Gorgon’s head was a gift from Perseus, who slew the monster while looking at her reflection in his shield instead of directly at her face, which would have turned him to stone. In art history, Medusa leers comically from a round frame: snaky locks for hair, tusks, a pig’s snout for a nose. She sticks out her tongue at you. The message is “Don’t mess with me, you weakling.”
Athena is direct: she never tries to seduce anyone or wheedle to get her way. Her brand of wisdom is a form of common sense, which was something I lacked, a muscle that did not get much exercise in college or graduate school. I was a good worker, though—the only job I ever had that I was truly terrible at was waiting on tables—and by the time I got to The New Yorker there were different kinds of women to observe: a cheerful receptionist heading back to graduate school, proofreaders of all styles—zealous, jealous, quietly brilliant—and wickedly good writers, like Pauline Kael and Janet Malcolm. When I was promoted to the copydesk, my dream job, and it was just me and the words, I had a crisis of confidence. No one thanked you when you did something right, but when you screwed up they had ways of letting you know.
The copydesk was like a sieve for prose: the copy editor filtered out impurities without adding anything new. I swung back and forth between extremes, trying to do less rather than more while also trying not to draw attention to myself by missing anything egregious. I wanted to write, so I was envious when one of my contemporaries at the office succeeded in placing a story in The Talk of the Town. When I copy-edited a colleague’s work, I had to filter out my own impurities. One evening I ran into William Shawn in the elevator vestibule. “You look troubled,” he said. Probably I was worried about having to share an elevator with Mr. Shawn, but I told him I was not sure I would ever master my job on the copydesk. He gave me a steady look—we were almost the same height; he was five foot five, and his eyes were at the same level as mine—and assured me that I would learn by osmosis.
Athena turned out to be a good model for a copy editor. She wouldn’t worry about offending a writer or whether a writer liked her or not, and she wouldn’t let anyone get away with anything. I just had to trust that my motives were pure: I was there for the language. Once I’d absorbed the ethos of copy editing, and moved from the copydesk, where you couldn’t correct things even when you knew they were wrong, to the next level, among the copy editors I most admired—page O.K.’ers, in The New Yorker’s terminology—I stopped worrying so much. At a museum, I was attracted to a print of a Gorgon, leering comically with her tongue stuck out. I bought that print and pinned it up over my desk.
ATHENA APPEARS IN Book 2 of the Odyssey as Mentor, a friend to whom Odysseus entrusted the care of his son when he left Ithaca for Troy. The word mentor, meaning counselor or teacher, comes to us directly from Homer. It is thousands of years old. William Shawn was acting as a mentor when he spoke to me in the vestibule, counseling patience. Sometimes all it takes is a hint, like a drop of iodine in a glass of water, to tint your view of things and help you see the way forward. As a child, I had a pattern of making friends with girls who had older sisters—a big sister would have made all the difference to me. As I got older, my mentors got younger. They just had to be people who had more experience than I did. But, crucially, a mentor has to choose you. You can’t force someone to take you on.
There was a tradition of mentoring in the copy department at The New Yorker—one of the veterans took it upon herself to train the next generation—but sometimes it felt as if I were learning how to navigate between Scylla and Charybdis. Scylla was Eleanor Gould, a genius, someone it was impossible to emulate because you couldn’t possess her formidable intelligence. Charybdis was Lu Burke, a taskmaster, who hurled dictionaries at people’s heads. Away from the office, as I got deeper into Greek, I found a gentler mentor in a woman at Barnard who agreed to tutor me in modern Greek. Her name was Dorothy Gregory. She was the best teacher I’ve ever had.
Dorothy was petite, with dark hair and eyes, a sharp chin, and a sweet, archaic smile, as if she were amused at something from a vast distance. She was always well dressed: tweed skirt, wool sweater, belted coat. She was generous, often complimenting people. “You look like a model,” she’d say, though not to me. “You always come running,” she observed once when I arrived at her office breathless after rushing uptown from work.
Dorothy was from Corfu, which is in the Ionian Sea, west of mainland Greece. She had lived in Michigan and Indonesia and done graduate work at Columbia, specializing in Walt Whitman. This makes sense in retrospect: Whitman is our most rhapsodic poet, and Dorothy loved the work of the Nobel Prize–winning Greek poet Odysseus Elytis, who rhapsodized about all the islands in the Aegean and all the regions of Greece and their people. Rhapsodos, αψωδός, means a stitcher of songs, from άπτω, to sew, and δή, ode. It was the word for someone who recited epic poetry in ancient times. In modern Greek, άφτης (ráftis) means tailor—a word that stuck with me, so that once, in Thessaloniki, coming upon a writer friend who was sewing a button onto his shirt in the lobby of a hotel, I could say, with authority, “Ο ράφτης”—“The tailor.” Rhapsodic has a sense of wonder in English that comes from the poet’s engagement with the material.
Dorot
hy was endlessly patient with me, and indulgent of my desire to learn this immensely complex tongue and one day dance on a table in emulation of Zorba the Greek.
Sometimes Dorothy made me feel as if I were the mentor in this relationship. Once, crossing the street, I noted that we were jaywalking. “What did you say?” Dorothy said.
“Jaywalking. It’s when you cross against the light.” I’m not sure where it comes from, but I always associated it with jail.
“Jaywalking!” she repeated. “You taught me something!”
Greek was my therapy in those days, my relief from my native tongue and the life that went with it. I wrote stilted paragraphs on such topics as washing my clothes at the laundromat: I aired my dirty linen on paper. I could be unspeakably vulgar in my adopted tongue, as when I reported on a trip to the pharmacy with my friend Clancey in search of cough medicine, and the pharmacist asked whether I needed an expectorant or a suppressant: “ ‘Cough for the man,’ Clancey told me. I did.”
Dorothy laughed. The Greek word káno, like the French faire and the Italian fare, means both “I do” and “I make,” and does not do double duty as a reinforcing verb, the way it does in English. The past tense, έκανα, is what Greek children holler from the toilet (“I made!”) when they have had a bowel movement.
So much of language study is learning not to say things.
But most of the time it was exhilarating, and my notebooks filled with new vocabulary. Dorothy taught me a little modern Greek history, including the legend of Bouboulina, a woman who commanded a fleet during the War of Independence, in 1821. She explained the rituals of Orthodox Easter, when families roast a lamb on a spit over coals in the yard. I was taken by the custom of tapping together red-dyed hard-boiled eggs—whoever’s egg doesn’t crack is the winner. I asked Dorothy why the Greeks dye their eggs only the color red, and her first response was to wonder why we in the West dye our eggs all those dull pastels when a vibrant red is the obvious choice. “Red is the color of blood and the color of joy,” she said.
