Anonyponymous: The Forgotten People Behind Everyday Words by John Marciano

Author:John Marciano
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Language Arts & Disciplines, Linguistics, Eponyms, Language, Terms and phrases, English Language History, Dictionaries, English language, General, Etymology, Literary Criticism, Language Arts, Linguistics - Etymology, Literacy
ISBN: 9781596916531
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2009-10-27T07:00:00+00:00

pan·der v. To cynically cater to another’s interests.

The character from whom this term originates has a long and varied history on the margins of great literature. In Homer’s Iliad, Pandarus was a Trojan archer who played a pivotal role in the conflict, breaking a truce with the Greeks by firing off a hasty arrow. The medieval romance of Troilus and Cressida, however, found Pandarus performing a rather different function.

First, about Troilus. He was the little brother of the Trojan princes Hector and Paris, known mostly for having been really good-looking and getting whacked by Achilles. Homer mentions his name only in passing. In the Middle Ages, however, this bit player suddenly became the protagonist of a great love story. No longer just some pretty boy, Troilus valiantly battles Achilles, wounding him, and even routs his fearsome Myrmidons. The crux of the drama is Troilus’s love for Cressida, who is being held prisoner by Troilus’s father, Priam, in retaliation for her father’s desertion. Troilus needs someone to help him get to Cressida. Enter Pandarus.

Pandarus is Troilus’s friend and the uncle of the imprisoned Cressida; taking pity on the lovesick Trojan prince, Pandarus acts as Troilus’s go-between in wooing the girl. At least, this is how the story went by the time the twelfth-century Roman de Troie got retold by Boccaccio (1330s) and re-retold by Geoffrey Chaucer, from whose Troilus and Criseyde (1380s) the name popularly entered our language. A “pandare” meant a helper in secret love affairs, but the term soon took on a more negative, pimplike connotation, so much so that when Shakespeare wrote his version of Troilus and Cressida (c. 1602) he made Pandarus a cynical degenerate merrily willing to procure his niece for the Trojan prince. The Bard also endowed the character with a remarkable degree of self-conscious prescience:

Since I have taken such pains to bring you together, let all pitiful goers-between be called to the world’s end after my name, call them all—Pandars!

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