Summer daze: on the definition of hero

It's that moment of the summer where, if you're on the right corner at the right time of the day, you can imagine you're the last person on earth.

Photo: What some people do during the summer.

There are no cars, no people walking. The stoplight turn green, yellow and red and back again. You feel as if, like St. Francis, you could tear off your clothes and stand in the middle of the intersection, and unlike St. Francis, no one would rush to cover you with a blanket.

It is an illusion, of course. Soon enough, it will be hot and busy-- and perhaps more busy on BwP, but we'll see.

In the meantime, I figure it's safe to do a geek post, which will please me and preserve a record of a momentary thought, and with luck please my geek fans, all two of them.

My last post on heroization was the second draft of a post I did on Open Salon, where I maintain a presence still but almost never post original stuff, since the owners of the site own whatever you post there.

I did, however, get a comment from that post that pertains to the definition of the hero, and that motivated a little thought and research (thanks, Ashlie). The commenter was confused by my definition of heroes in ancient Greece as anyone who stands out from the crowd, anyone talked about.

The commenter was trying to get a handle on my poor, rough draft post, and quoted from Wikipedia's entry on "hero:"

According to Eric Partridge in Origins, the Greek word Hērōs "is akin to" the Latin seruāre, meaning to safeguard. Partridge concludes, "The basic sense of both Hera and hero would therefore be 'protector'.

This has always fascinated me-- the idea that you can detect the original meaning of a word in the history of it, especially by comparison to similar words in other, related languages.

Some words have plenty of cognates in other languages, and the meaning isn't contested. In the Indo-European language family, the word for "father" is similar in bunches of sister languages.

No one agrees about where "hero" comes from.

Eric Partridge, an educated layperson, is quoting a Classics scholar who has spent a long time studying the word "hero." But Deborah Lyons, in her book Gender and Immortality: Heroines in Greek Myth and Cult (Princeton, 1996), reports that this theory is called into question by a single Bronze Age usage of the word found on a clay tablet, a usage that does not include the "w" sound that you get in the Latin verb servare (pronounced sehr-WAH-reh).

Ouch.

Lyons then goes on to list other possibilities, including that "hero" originally meant "the young, divine consort of the goddess... ripe for marriage." Also that it meant one who "belongs to the goddess of the seasons."

Who knows?

But back to the commenter, who hung on and tried to comprehend my foolishness:

...you're using the word the same way i would use "celebrity".

Exactly.

I believe there isn't much difference, functionally, between our celebrities and the heroes of ancient Greek mythology.

Both groups are talked about endlessly. Both stand out from the crowd. Both are involved in engaging, popular stories. The Greek hero sometimes has a more explicit religious function. But there are plenty of people who "worship" celebrities today and maintain their shrines.

Think about Graceland.

So regardless of what the word "hero" meant originally in Greece or in some misty Indo-European prehistoric past, I use "hero" to mean someone who matters to human beings, regardless of his or her time, place, gender, or status as "demigod."

Thus endeth the geek post for this summer day. Where's my pool membership card?

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