It's Enough to Drive You Mad, Especially If You're Crossing a Rubicon

As I threatened last week, today we follow up on Alyssum and Rubicon. Both are proper nouns, hence the capitalization.

Alyssum, not to be confused with my lissome niece Elissa, is also part of a family – the mustard family (not the Colonel Mustard family, for you Clue players.) There is an entire genus named Alyssum, and Alyssum is characterized by clusters of small white or yellow flowers. The name arrived in English in the 1550s, having come through Latin from Greek. The Greek word, alysson is, according to etymonline.com, “perhaps the neuter of adjective alyssos ‘curing madness,’ from privative prefix a + lyssa ‘madness, rage, fury.’” My dictionary inserts “canine” between curing and madness. In case you’re wondering whether flowers are a key component in the rabies vaccine, they’re not.

Rubicon is the other proper noun carried over from last week. With the same root as ruby or rubicund (the Latin word rubicundus), it is similar in appellation to the eight Red Rivers in the U.S. or the five in Canada or similar ones around the world. When the banks of a river have surrounding soil that is red it is often used to describe the river itself.

But the Rubicon is familiar to many in the phrase “Crossing the Rubicon.” While there are two Swedish bands (Armageddon and The Sounds) who use that title for one of their albums, and a couple of other bands (The Human Extract and Revolution Renaissance) have used the phrase as a title of a song, it is more commonly known as a metaphor for reaching the point of no return.

Students of history know this refers back to Julius Caesar, and his decision on January 10, 49 BC, after having conquered what is now France and southern England as Governor of Illyricum and Cisalpine Gaul, to “invade” Italy, the border of which was the Rubicon River. While one report has Caesar saying Alea iacta est, which of course means “The die is cast,” the one thing that is certain is that this began his march on Rome, which resulted in his becoming the dictator before the year was out.

I used the word appellation above. Appellation means name or title, but also is used of the act of naming. It came to English in the mid-1400s, from the Middle French word apeler. But another form of the word came to English in the late 1400s from the old French word apelacion, which the French got from the Latin word appellationem, which was an addressing or accosting, but also an appeal, or a name or title. It actually was a noun of action (like the act of naming), and was derived from the past participle of appelare, from which we get the verb appeal. So the act of appealing to a higher authority is a newer sense (by about ½ century) than the more common meaning of name or naming.

It’s enough to drive you mad, especially if you’re crossing a Rubicon.