Would a Nym by Any Other Nym Smell as Sweet

       A few of us have established a kind of “Breakfast Club.”  We try to meet at different establishments about once a month.  Sometimes we may walk around the area to get better acquainted, both with our friends and the immediate environment.

     So far we’ve tried out the Massey Hill Grill, Zorba’s on Raeford Road, the New York Restaurant, and , most recently, the Haymount Grill.  Our next venture will likely be “Becky’s” in Hope Mills and within walking distance of the new dam and (soon, it appears, lake). We may wait to have that get-together until after the lake is “filled.”

       Besides me,  those who have met for breakfast include Humans Relations Commissioner Frank Maness, CPA and County Commissioner candidate Marshall Faircloth, Ralph Schonert, Cypress Lakes golf buddies Jennings Smith and Don Lafferty, and Ron Gardner. Some of these were accidental encounters but certainly not incidental.

     At the Haymount Grill last Friday, Marshall and I had a quite interesting conversation about William Faulkner’s great novel,  “The Sound and the Fury.”  Part of that discussion (and I commend CPA Faircloth highly for his wanting to educate himself in the humanities, and perhaps especially in literature) had to do with the source of Faulkner’s title from “Macbeth” and how it related to the novel’s theme and plot.

        This got me thinking of a different kind of connection: between a suffix that originates in Greek  that provides the basis for a good many useful  words and a character in Shakespeare’s great history play “Henry the Fifth.”

        In that play there is a minor character, a foot soldier and a sort of typical “rustic” of the kind that are found in a great many of Shakespeare’s plays.  This character is a comrade of two other soldiers, Bardolph and Pistol, and his name is “Nym.”  Now Shakespeare was said by Ben Johnson to “have small Latin and less Greek.”  But doubtless the playwright did know that “Nym” was a suffix meaning “name.”  Therefore Nym’s name is really “Name.”

        How many of these English words do you recognize, each of them ending in “-nym”?  Can you give an example of the application of each?

     acronym

      antonym

       eponym

       holonym

       homonym

      hypernym

     hyponym

     meronym

     metonym

     patronym

     pseudonym

     synonym

Nym would be proud, I am sure, if you show you know at least three of these.

RJR