MARATHON: recalls an ancient battle

　　Nearly two and one-half millenniums ago a little band of 10,000 Athenians defeated 100,000 Persians at the battle of Marathon. A courageous runner brought the news of the thrilling victory to the city of Athens that lay some 26miles away. When the Olympic Games were revived for the first time in 1869, a long distance race was planned to cover the same ground that the earlier runner had traversed almost 2,400 years before. Quite properly, a Greek won this event. Now the word marathon can

　　11.Terms of Place,Time, Shape, and Size, and their Origins

　　FATHOM

　　Fathom is now six feet.And since sailors are primarily interested in depth,we finally devised the abstract verb fathom which meant “to get to the bottom of ”as of a problem or mystery.

　　FURLONG:as long as a furrow

　　The modern fancier of race horses calls this measure of distance a furlong,but there was a period in England when the word was spelled furlang,furh for the “furrow”that the farmer turns with his plow,and lang for “long.”That is,a furlong was just as long as a furrow,and in those days a furrow was reasonably constant in length because a furrow was thought of as existing in a field of ten acres.But this measure was still a little elastic for accuracy and by the 9th century the wise men decided to call a furlong an eighth of a mile and let it go at that.Today a furlong is 220 yards.

　　GEYSER: a gusher

　　In Iceland in an area of about two square miles there are approximately a hundred hot springs that have been a source of wonder to men for centuries .The Icelandic name for such a spring is hver.The largest of the group,however ,has been named the geysir,and from this came our word geyser. The literal meaning of geysir in Iceland is gusher.

　　HALCYON:started as a kingfisher

　　Halcyon days are days of peace and calm when the skies are clear and the winds are still.These days had an actual place on the ancient calendar and were the fourteen days at about the time of the winter solstice .It was during this period that the halcyon,or kingfisher,was supposed to sit on her nest as it floated in the sea.She was believed,you see,to have a magic power to calm the winds and waves so that her nest would be secure .Halcyon is a Latin word that came from the Grddk term,alcyon,or “kingfisher.”

　　JOURNEY: a day’s mileage

　　This word is based,with several shifts of sound and derivation ,on the Latin word diurnum,”day.”A journey used to mean the distance covered in a “day”;and that journal of yours is what you have written in a “day.”So is a diary (from dies ,another Latin word for day).When we sojourn we spend the “day”and when we adjourn we have finished those things,”belonging to the day.”Or should we adjourn sine die,Latin for “without a day,”our meeting is adjourned indefinitely.And you could guess that a journeyman plumber is really a “day laborer.”

　　MILESTONE: a thousand paces

　　It seems that Augustus,first of the Roman emperors,set up a central stone in the Forum called a milliarium from which all distances were reckoned. The mane of this key stone was derived from the Latin word mille which meant a “thousand,”for the Roman mile was calculated as a thousand paces with each pace equalling five feet. Under the imperial regime,the roads were systematically marked off every mille passuum,or thousand paces.and a stone,or milliarium,was set up with the mane of the emperor carved on it,the date ,the place from which the distance was measured,and usually the name of the roadmaker.In forming our word milestone,we took the first half from the Latin word ,mille,but for the second half we adopted the simple native word stan,now stone.