On the saurus and thesaurus

 

While a pterosaur is a “saur”, it’s not of the “dino” variety. There is such a thing as paleo-pedantry, and we make sure we own it.

 

“Dinosaur” comes from an Ancient Greek root “deinos-“, which means “terrible”, and “saur”, which means a lizard. One could argue that all lizards are terrible, but we’re sticking with objective complaints here. Like why is Bulbasaur a “saur”, but not Charmander? And why did a book of words ever come to be called a “thesaurus”? On the former, since I chose Squirtle (which is objectively the best), I do not care much about it. For the latter though – the answer is spellings.

 

You see, “treasure”, which is Latin for, well “treasure”, is spelt in Greek as “thesaurus”. And when a book came along which had a “hoard, or treasure” of words in it, it came to be called a “thesaurus”. It wasn’t like a usual dictionary, which demands you to look up an exact word. This was a treasure because here you stumbled upon a word – for an emotion, or noun, or a form of emotion or noun – which you did not know existed. Which I think is beautiful. In fact, you can call any treasure a “thesaur”, and any treasurer, a “thesaurer” if you so dare. 

 

Now, with no remorse for that digression, and keeping up with the Latin-Greek spelling tussle, the root “deinos-” in Latin is spelt as “dire”. Which means anything “dreadful” or “fear inducing”. This terminology was given by Sir Richard Owen. He was a palaentologist, who came across a fossil, and when asked what was the fossil of, he said “it seemed of a terrible lizard”. And as the case usually is, with people trying to sound smart in English by not speaking in English, he called it “dinosaur” (well, actually he coined “dinosauria”, an entirely new taxonomic group, but even I can see that that’s unnecessary information).

 

"Owen Riding His Hobby" by Frederick Waddy, drawn in 1873, during the peak of Owen-Darwin feud. Owen's reputation dwindled in his later years as he stood firm on his stance of "immutability of species", and refused to accept that species evolve.

 

And I guess that’s another reason to study etymology – to call out the gatekeepers.