Here's a word that conjures up all sorts of things for me. When I was young, I went to see, as many school kids did, the traveling King Tut exhibit. I don't remember much of the actual exhibit just that it was huge and for a kid like me, exciting and exotic. It conjured up things from movies, from other worlds, places I wanted to see. I honestly don't remember if they had one or a replica of:
Sarcophagus -- a stone coffin; broadly : coffin
But I sure knew what one was from all the movies my parents and I used to watch when I was young. As I've mentioned before, much of my love for words stem from my father. He was a physician and he used to teach me words from science and explain their origins, a lot of them Latin or Greek. I discovered that I could figure out the meaning of a lot of words by understanding basic language origins. And this one was perfect. Here's an excerpt from Merriam-Webster on sarchophagus --
Body-eating coffins might sound like something out of a horror film, but flesh-eating stone? The latter plays a role in the etymology of sarcophagus; it is the literal translation of líthos sarkóphagos, the Greek phrase that underlies the English term. The phrase traveled through Latin between Greek and English, taking on the form lapis sarcophagus before being shortened to sarcophagus. It's not clear whether the ancient Romans believed that a certain type of limestone from the region around Troy would dissolve flesh (and thus was desirable for making coffins). That assertion came from Roman scholar Pliny the Elder, but he also reported such phenomena as dog-headed people and elephants who wrote Greek. Regardless, there is no doubt that the ancient Greek word for the limestone combined sárx, meaning "flesh," with a derivative of phagein, a verb meaning "to eat."
You can check out our own Codex Egyptium if you are interested in ancient Egypt and or sarcophagi (the very cool plural of the word of the day...
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