Gibbous

‘A gibbous moon,’ my husband observed the other night, as indeed the moon must be for almost half the time. But when he asked me where the word came from, I could hardly say. That is because, as a girl, I was denied a proper classical education.

I did know where to find out, though, and it comes straight from the Latin gibbus, ‘hunchbacked’, which hardly gets us much further. (The initial hard g in the English word is anomalous.) The related Greek word is kuphos, but this is not the word Homer used in the description of Thersites in the Iliad where William Cowper in his translation wrote: ‘Gibbous shoulders, o’er his breast contracted, pinch’d it.’

Homer’s word is kurto (kurtos, ‘bulging’). Alexander Pope, however, chose mountain when he translated the Iliad. Part of his passage describing Thersites came out like this:

With witty malice studious to defame,
Scorn all his joy, and laughter all his aim:—
But chief he gloried with licentious style
To lash the great, and monarchs to revile.
His figure such as might his soul proclaim;
One eye was blinking, and one leg was lame:
His mountain shoulders half his breast o’erspread,
Thin hairs bestrew’d his long misshapen head.

It could almost be a description of Pope himself, a hunchbacked man; or, rather, an enemy’s description of Pope, as he knew well enough. And when Thomas Cooke (who, aged only 21, had published a poem attacking Pope) renewed the attack with criticisms of his translation of the Iliad, it was this episode of Thersites on which he focused. Ostensibly Cooke was taking Pope to task for straying from the text. But in blaming Pope for writing of Thersites, ‘His Body such as might his soul proclaim’, when Homer wrote, ‘He was the vilest Man that came to Troy’, Crooke implies that Pope’s body proclaims him the vilest man in London.