The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language

Stellafied and Oily Beavers

The zodiac is, of course, the little circular zoo that runs around the sky. It’s a zoo-diac because eleven of the twelve signs are living creatures and seven of them are animals. In fact, when the Greeks named the zodiac all of the signs were living creatures. Libra, the odd one out, was added in by the Romans.

The zodiac is filled with all sorts of strange word associations. Cancer is the crab largely because Galen thought that some tumours resembled crabs and partly because both words come from the Indo-European root qarq, which meant hard. Goats such as Capricorn skip about and are generally capricious, or goatlike. And bulls like Taurus get killed by toreadors. But let’s stick, for the moment, to Gemini, the twins.

The twins in question are two stars called Castor and Pollux, and how they came to be there is a tender and touching story. Despite what astronomers would have you believe, most of the stars were created not by energy cooling into matter, but by Zeus.

Zeus had a thing for a girl called Leda and decided to turn into a swan and have his wicked way with her. However, later that night Leda slept with her husband Tyndareus. The result was a rather complicated pregnancy and Leda popping out two eggs, which is enough to make any husband suspicious.

The first egg contained Helen (of Troy) and Clytemnestra. The second egg contained Pollux and Castor. Extensive mythological paternity testing revealed that Helen and Pollux were the children of Zeus, and Castor and Clytemnestra were the mortal children of Tyndareus, which can hardly have been much of a consolation for the poor chap.

Castor and Pollux were inseparable until one day Castor was stabbed and killed. Pollux, who was a demi-god, struck a deal with his dad that he could share his immortality with his twin brother, and the result was that Zeus turned them into two stars that could be together for ever in the heavens (well, in fact they’re sixteen light years apart, but let’s not get bogged down in details).

Castor was the Greek word for beaver, and to this day beavers all across the world belong to the genus Castor, even if they don’t know it. We usually think of beavers as sweet little creatures who build dams, but that’s not how a constipated Renaissance man would view them; a constipated Renaissance man would view them as his relief and his cure.

You see, the beaver has two sacs in his groin that contain a noxious and utterly disgusting oil that acts as a very effective laxative. This very valuable liquid was known as castor oil.

The name survives, but the source of the liquid has changed. To the delight of beavers everywhere, people discovered in the mid-eighteenth century that you can get exactly the same bowel-liberating effect from an oil produced from the seeds of Ricinus communis, also known as the castor oil plant. So though it’s still called castor oil, it’s no longer obtained from the groin of a beaver.

Several anatomical terms derive from the beaver, but in order to keep this chain of thought decent and pure and family-friendly, let us for the moment consider that beaver was once a word for beard.