podictionary - the podcast for word lovers

From 2006

Some listeners have been asking for words that arose from languages other than Latin.  I chose hyena out of the blue, thinking, that’s likely to be African isn’t it?

Which just goes to show how hard it is to get away from Latin and Greek roots since hyena too arrived in English after the Norman invasion.  Ultimately the word is from a Greek word meaning “swine” or “pig.” And more than one source tells me that this is due to the ruff of hair on its back and shoulders that supposedly reminded people of similar hair on pigs—presumably wild boars, since the rest of a hyena doesn’t look like any kind of other animal.

There appears to have been a longstanding revulsion of hyenas although two references I came across said they were also held in high esteem but for different reasons.  The Devil’s Dictionary says hyenas were once revered because they visited graves at night, then old Ambrose Bierce goes on to say that that’s nothing to look up to since physicians do that—presumably he’s referring to grave robbing for anatomical study, I don’t know.

But there seems to be a low opinion of hyenas among Africans, at least in the literature I looked over, due to this very habit, not just visiting graves, but eating dead people.

Brewers Dictionary of Phrase and Fable steers us back to Latin in explaining that Pliny thought hyenas had a kind of stone in their eye, that if you put under your tongue gave the gift of prophecy. So that to the ancient Romans at least hyenas were looked up to, but only if they were dead.

Medieval Europeans would not likely have seen too many hyenas but they still had opinions about them.  For some reason they considered hyenas to be far too interested in sex, and in some cases accused them of homosexuality or even of gender changing through their lives, like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly.

While these assertions are pure myth, the truth is strange enough that we can forgive our ancestors their misconceptions.  I have never had the pleasure of examining the private parts of a hyena, but from what I’m told, the females have something that so resembles a penis it makes mating downright tricky.  In fact the females are the dominant sex among hyenas.  They are larger and more aggressive and researchers are finding that this is due to what we would normally associate with male hormones, that in hyenas females seem to apply to themselves as well.  It’s this exposure to male hormones that makes the female’s genitals look like a penis.  In addition to the likelihood of ancient people seeing females and thinking they were male; when male hyenas are young pups, they exhibit a behavior called play mounting which is the only practice they will get before later having to approach a slavering, dominant, aggressive penis wielding female and trying to figure out how to get it on.

No wonder people were confused.

The Zulu name for a hyena is impisi, that means “the one who cleans up.” The Sestwana name is sephiri that means the ‘animal of the secret’.