ETYMOLOGY 101
The origin of: mentor
A mentor is a trusted counselor, guide, tutor, or coach, a definition many attribute to the eponymous character in Homer’s Odyssey. Before Odysseus sets off to fight in the Trojan war, he leaves his palace and his son Telemachus in the care of Mentor:
| Mentor was an old friend of Odysseus, to whom the King had entrusted his whole household when he sailed, with orders to defer to the aged Laertes and keep everything intact.
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Although Mentor first appears in the Odyssey, there is compelling evidence that it was not Homer who gave us our modern definition of mentor, but François Fénelon, a French author who penned Les Aventures de Telemaque (The Adventures of Telemachus) in 1699. First of all, Mentor plays a very minor role in the Odyssey, and in fact does little to care for Odysseus’ palace. According to Telemachus:
A mob of hangers-on are pestering my mother with their unwanted attentions…they spend their whole time in and out of our place. They slaughter our oxen, our sheep, our fatted goats; they feast themselves and drink our sparkling wine with never a thought for all the wealth that is being wasted. The truth is that there is no one like Odysseus in charge to purge the house of this disease.
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Les Aventures de Telemaque, the most reprinted book of the 18th century, was a “continuation” of Homer’s epic poem and a thinly-disguised allegory that attacked the absolutism of Louis XIV. Fénelon’s Mentor is given a much more prominent role than Homer’s, and clearly acts as a trusted counselor, guide, and tutor to Telemachus:
Forget not, [Telemachus], the pains I took when you were a child, to make you as wise and as valiant as your father.
[Mentor] regulated the whole course of the life of Telemachus in order to raise him to the highest pitch of glory.
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A close reading of both texts reveals that our modern notion of mentor comes not from Homer’s Odyssey, but from Fénelon’s Les Aventures. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first usage of mentor did not appear until 1750. This suggests the popularity of Les Aventures might have been responsible for introducing the word into the language in its modern sense.
Source: Roberts, Andy. Homer’s Mentor: Duties Fulfilled or Misconstrued? (1999).
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WELL I'LL BE!
THE ANSWER TO A QUESTION YOU NEVER ASKED
How did “boycott” originate?
Boycott is derived from the surname of Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott, who managed an estate for Lord Erne in Connemara, Ireland. Boycott was exceedingly unpopular for the rather harsh methods he had for collecting rents from the absentee landlord’s tenants. At the time, there was considerable rural agitation against the existing land laws in Ireland, which prevented tenants from owning their own land. The Irish Land League, founded in 1879 by Michael Davitt and headed by legendary statesman Charles Stewart Parnell, had as its aim the abolition of landlordism. Its most successful campaign was against Captain Boycott in 1880.
That fall, the tenants of Lord Erne’s estate banded together and demanded a reduction in rents. Boycott refused and had the tenants ejected from the land. In response, the tenants, inspired by the Land League, began to harass Boycott in every conceivable manner. They stopped working his fields, intercepted his mail, insulted him, and burned him in effigy. Boycott appealed to the government for aid, and a gang of 50 Orangemen came to harvest his crops.
The success of the “Boycott” was immediate; within the year, the term appeared in several papers to describe a form of organized protest adopted to coerce another to change his or her position.
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