Eponyms are words that have come into being from an association with a person’s name. You have to dig into Greek mythology to understand the denotation for “tantalize” as one of my students discovered much to our combined enjoyment and greater learning.

Real Reading In Action

Inquiries into how I would teach reading, prompted several sessions with students, where I invited them to interpret some of Aesop’s Fables. Using Helen Ward’s wonderfully illustrated retelling, students were given paragraphs to read orthographically.

The very first fable, Sour Grapes, generated a wealth of opportunity to expand vocabulary and deepen understanding.  This tale was also the source of the investigation into the concept of temptation.

The tale begins:

“There was once a bunch of particularly fine grapes hanging temptingly from a vine that had wound its way up a tree. And as usual with such unguarded temptations there was soon also a fox.

The tantalizing fruits hung just a little higher than the fox could reach but he would not be thwarted.”

 And so we had more than enough to start our interpretations. While working with his mother, one student, Hamza gave an excellent recital of this passage pronouncing the words most beautifully, but afterwards admitted that he didn’t really know what some of these words meant—thus presenting an excellent opportunity for an investigation.

Hamza had been engaged in real orthography with his older sister and mother for some time and knew how to analyse a word to find its base element. He produced his word sum but was stumped when it came to using this information to better understand the meaning of the word.  He needed a more detailed Orthographic Analysis.

Hamza analysed the word in this way: tantalizing → tantal + ize + ing

While his mum and I agreed with his word sum, the problem lay in that we were unable to come up with very many other words that we knew of that used that base element. So we went to the books.

John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins explained why we'd had so much difficulty—the word is an eponym which had come into use in English during the 16th century. As such it did not have to comply to the laws of English orthography, in fact its spelling gave no clues at all to its denotation. We needed to know the story of Tantalus for that (see below).

The dictionaries helped us though, particularly with confirming the base element. We found that the base <tantal> has been used scientifically with reference to rocks and metals. However, we did not include these words in our matrix as they are not in everyday use.

During our investigations we did discover that the word tantalus itself came into use in English in the 19th century to denote “a case in which bottles may be locked with their contents tantalizingly visible.”  An excellent word indeed for it.

 The Story of Tantalus

The legendary King Tantalus was a mortal welcomed to the table of the god Zeus in Olympus. He repaid such privilege by stealing ambrosia and nectar to bring back to his people and divulged to mortals the secrets of the gods, which had been entrusted to him by Zeus.

To add insult to injury, he cooked his son Pelops and served him in a banquet to the gods as a sacrifice. The gods, on learning of his gruesome act and betrayal, condemned him to an eternal and most fitting punishment.

Forced to stand in the Underworld in a pool of clear water, Tantalus was forbidden to drink or to eat. Every time he bent down to quench his thirst, the waters in which he stood receded from him. Just above his head, clusters of luscious fruit hung from a tree growing on the banks of the pool. But every time he extended his hand to pluck at the fruit, he found the fruit just out of reach. Tantalus suffered agony from thirst, hunger and unfulfilled anticipation.

To tantalize then, is to tease or disappoint by promising something desirable and then withholding it or, as Dr. Johnson put it, “to torment by the show of pleasures that cannot be reached.”