Fun for Friday: What About Bacchus?
Image by Ben Kerckx from Pixabay
This week’s etymology dive is an odd one, related to the Roman God Bacchus (the Greek God Dionysus). I had the thought recently that it seems like the words “baccalaureate” and “bacchanalia” might be related to one another. But their meanings are different enough that I wasn’t certain how they might be connected.
Bacchus and Dionysus are their respective cultures’ Gods of wine, fertility, and revelry. So the bacchanalia was a Roman festival honoring Bacchus and involving a lot of wine and revelry. Meanwhile, baccalaureate is connected to an undergraduate degree, most often called a bachelor’s degree.
Where this gets complicated is that Bacchus’s name is also a Greek word, “Bakchos,” which was then adopted into Latin as Bacchus. Latin does have the word “bacca,” meaning berry (generally used for small fruits, including olives), but I haven’t been able to determine which came first in Latin, putting us in a chicken and the egg situation. Were berries named after Bacchus, or did the Romans hear the Greek word “Bakchos” and adopt it as their own, deriving “bacca” from the name of the God of the vine?
And then we get into the origin of “baccalaureate,” which is complicated, to say the very least. All of the information I can find on the origin of this word is connected to Medieval Latin, which is a very different beast than Classical Latin. It appears that the Medieval Latinists, well known for borrowing words from other sources and using folk etymology to reinterpret the origin of words, may have created this word in a roundabout way. It’s connected to the word “bachelor,” which can be traced back to the eleventh century, but not to a solid word origin. Bachelor then was changed to “baccalaureus,” a false derivation of “bacca laurea/lauri,” or laurel berry, suggesting the laurel crowns of conquerors and poets.
(There’s also a theory that it could have come from “baculum,” or staff, in relation to academic regalia of that period. And baculum is also related to bacteria… which could either be saying something about medieval scholars’ hygiene, or maybe this is something the wine is meant to solve.)
I’m going to see one of my friends who has a degree in Classics and is in academia this weekend, and you know I’m going to rant at him about this. If I get any new insight, I’ll be sure to make another post on the topic, because this one’s got me bewildered!
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