Clownish Greek on Super Millionaire
The prime-time game show Super Millionaire featured a question that asked what coulrophobia meant. The correct answer was "fear of clowns." After being disappointed with not finding the Greek etymon in my Great Scott Greek Lexicon (LSJM), I heard from Regis the claim that the term came from Greek coulron meaning "stilts."
Other sites give more, though not necessarily more accurate, information. For example, The Mavens' Word of the Day has:
Coulrophbia [sic] is the name for 'an unnaturally strong fear of clowns'. You may also hear it called clownophobia informally. The word comes from the Greek words kolobatheron [sic] (stilt) and phobia (fear) and was coined fairly recently, in the 1980s.
The Macmillan Essential Dictionary Resource Site explains it a little differently:
Coined during the 1990s, the word coulrophobia is based on the Greek word koulon [sic] ("limb") and related derivatives suggestive of stilts and stilt-walking, i.e. the Greek kolobathristes means "one who goes on stilts".
According to LSJM, κωλοβαθριστής means "one that goes on stilts", though it is only attested (according to TLG) in Hesychius in order to define καδαλίων. The related noun κωλόβαθρα "stilts" is found twice in Artemidorus, Onirocriticon 3.15 and once more in Hesychius as a definition for κάνδαλοι. The word κωλόβαθρα is evidently a combination of κῶλον "limb, leg" and βάθρον "base, pedestal, scaffold, step, rung, etc."
I'm really wondering about the correctness of the derivation of coulrophobia. The form of the word is very strange. Why is the omega rendered as -ou-? As far as I can glean from LSJM and TLG, κοῦλον is not the standard Greek form, nor even an attested alternate, for "limb"; that should be κῶλον colon.
Also, what's with the intrusion of the -r-? If from κωλόβαθρα, why isn't the term more properly colobathrophobia but that would mean "fear of stilts" or better yet colobathristophobia?
Furthermore, there are other Greek words meaning "clown" that might be better candidates for the phobia, resulting in such possible coinages as scleropaectophobia, phluacophobia, scoptolophobia, gelotopoeophobia, and geloeastophobia. To bring this back to Biblical studies, the last term is actually found in the LXX translation of Job 31:5 (Εἰ δὲ ἤμην πεπορευομένος μετὰ γελοιαστῶν, ...) but the meaning of the word here in context seems to be more like "tricksters" instead of "jesters" or "buffoons" as the LSJM suggests.
Sant'Agostino
I've been noticing quite a few good websites on patristics based in Italy. Here is one devoted to Augustine of Hippo with Migne's Latin text plus an Italian translation:
The site includes a couple of English language pages, but the bulk of the site is in Italian and Latin. Enjoy!
"The Origin(s) of the 'Caesarean' Text"
I have been rather busy working on various off-line things. One of them is a paper of mine whose proposal has been accepted for the upcoming 2004 SBL Annual Meeting in San Antonio. Here is the abstract:
Eldon J. Epp's famous essay on the twentieth-century interlude in text criticism has decried the lack of progress in understanding the theory and history of the text, and the rise and fall of the so-called Caesarean text-type is a case in point. The twentieth century began confidently with the work of Lake and Streeter first in identifying a family of related MSS comprising Theta, fam. 1, fam. 13, 28, 565, and 700 and then in connecting this family to Codex W. As the century wore on, however, the Caesarean text-type disintegrated in the light of additional scrutiny, particularly in the work by Hurtado.
Stemmatics is a method used in classical text criticism that produces an explicit history of the textual witnesses for a manuscript tradition in the form of a family tree. While the volume of manuscripts and the occurrence of mixture have confounded attempts to apply stemmatics broadly to the text of the New Testament, new possibilities have been opened up for stemmatics by developments in computational biology. For example, the Canterbury Tales were recently edited using cladistics to generate a preliminary stemma of over 40 witnesses. This paper proposes to investigate two chapters of Mark using a form of cladistics designed for handling mixture and propose an origin or origins for the "Caesarean" text.
New TC List
Wieland Willker has informed me of his creation of a new textualcriticism list:
Since the TC-list is now dead, I have set up a (hopefully only) temporal replacement at Yahoo groups. It can be accessed at:
