What Do Isaiah, Diana Nyad, and Oreos have to do with Satyrs and Nymphs?

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the word satire that “The word in Latin was altered because of the word satyr, when people mistakenly thought there was a connection to the Greek satyr drama, from which we get satyr.” I’ve usually pronounced it “sat–er”, but the primary pronunciation listed on Dictionary.com is “sey-ter.”

Satyrs were, in Greek mythology, gods of the woods. They are the creatures pictured as half man (usually from the waist up, attached to the body and legs of a) half horse or goat. Etymonline.com says that in pre-Roman Greek art a satyr was represented as a “man-like being with the tail and ears of a horse; the modern conception of a being part man, part goat is from Roman sculptors, who seem to have assimilated them to the fauns of native mythology.”

Their role was to serve Bacchus, the god of wine. Surely not coincidentally they were known for their riotous and lascivious behavior. As a result, a man who is known for such behavior is sometimes called a satyr. While the being has an ancient history, the word satyr was not used in English until the 1300s.

The word satyr appears twice in the King James Version of the Bible, in Isaiah 13:21 and 34:14. The key to this use of satyr is the reference to the desert in the original. Hebrew has a word for a hairy monster believed to inhabit the desert regions: se’irim. The King James Version translators decided to use the word satyr instead of “bigfoot” or “yeti.”

Unbeknownst to me until today is that there is a condition known as satyriasis, and one who has that is also known as a satyr. I call it a condition because neither webmd.com nor psychiatry.com yielded any results for a search of the word.

That doesn’t stop the dictionary from defining it, etymonline.com from telling us that by the 1650s satyriasis appeared in English, or Wikipedia from devoting a page to hypersexuality and saying that in men it is known as satyriasis and in women as nymphomania.

While nymphomania seems to be a more common word than satyriasis, it is also not an officially recognized disorder or diagnosis. While the word nymph has been used in English since the 1300s, the word nymphomania was coined in 1775 in an English translation of a dissertation by French doctor M.D.T. Bienville on women with uncontrollable sexual desire.

Nymphs were only semi-dieties. The Greek word nymphe originally referred to a young wife, then to any beautiful young woman, before eventually taking on semi-divine status. Subgroups of nymphs are dryads and hamadryads (both wood nymphs), naiads (water nymph – see Diana Nyad), nereids (sea nymphs), and oreads (mountain nymphs). Oreads have no connection to Oreos, though sometimes nymphs – in the sense of beautiful young woman - in American vernacular are called “cookies.”

So that’s how you get from satyrs and nymphs to Diana Nyad and oreos.