Myth Made Mouth: Greek Words Still Taste of Gods

There is a moment — I had it at sixteen, reading a menu in Lyon — when you realise that language is not a neutral vehicle. My father ordered *soupe de poisson* and talked about the sea, but what he meant was something older than any sea he had ever touched. Words carry bodies inside them. The Greeks knew this. They built gods, then built the words to hold them, and somehow — impossibly, stubbornly — those words outlasted everything: the temples, the trade routes, the empires that thought they had replaced them.

Take *siren*. You use it every time an ambulance passes. The original sirens were not warning systems — they were women with birds' bodies who sang sailors to their deaths on the rocks near Sicily. Homer puts them in the *Odyssey* with such casual precision that you understand he had met someone who believed in them completely. The word entered Latin, then Old French, then English, and somewhere in that long migration it lost its feathers and its hunger and became a municipal sound. But when you hear one at three in the morning, something in you still flinches. The body remembers what the mind has forgotten.

*Echo* is the same. A nymph punished by Hera for talking too much — reduced, in one of mythology's most vindictive sentences, to repeating only the last words she heard. She loved Narcissus, who loved only his own reflection, and both of them became words we use for acoustics and for a clinical diagnosis of self-absorption. The myth contained the psychology two thousand years before psychology had a name for it. Ovid wrote it. Freud found it and thought he was discovering something new.

And *narcissism* itself — a man who stared into water until he died of it — now describes a personality structure, a social media epidemic, an entire generation's relationship with their phone cameras. The Greeks gave us the story. We keep proving it was true.

This is what mythology actually is: not a collection of stories people believed before they knew better, but a vocabulary for human behaviour that was so precisely observed it became permanent. The gods were never really about the gods. They were about us — the way we love, the way we destroy ourselves, the way we refuse to listen until it is too late.

The next time someone calls you a narcissist, or you hear a siren in the distance, or your voice bounces back to you in an empty stairwell — a Greek poet is reaching across twenty-five centuries and saying: *yes, I saw this too. I named it. You are not alone in it.*

That is what stories are for. That is what language is for. And that is why, every time I eat somewhere extraordinary, I want to know not just what is on the plate, but what word was used to describe it first.