Para

Even my husband is not old enough to recall the wheelchair archery competition at Stoke Mandeville on the day the 1948 Olympics opened in London. Such games came to be organised by the British Paraplegic Sports Society and so were called the Paralympic Games. It was a true portmanteau word, packing together paraplegic and Olympic.

But the International Paralympic Committee declares what it must know to be untrue: ‘The word Paralympic derives from the Greek preposition para (beside or alongside) and the word Olympic. Its meaning is that Paralympics are the parallel Games to the Olympics.’ They may well be parallel but that is not the historical origin of the word. The Bucks Advertiser had a place in recording this history, since Stoke Mandeville lies in its area. In 1954 the paper announced that ‘paraplegic athletes from all over the world had assembled for the Paralympics’.

Paraplegic itself meant in the 17th century ‘a Palsy which seizeth all the parts of the Body below the Head’, and could still be used even later to mean paralysis of one side of the body, only settling down to mean paralysis of the lower parts in the 19th century. Even if Paralympic had derived directly from para– as a prefix, it would not be out of the woods of unwelcome associations, for in Greek the prefix, in addition to signifying ‘by the side of’ also meant ‘amiss, faulty, irregular, disordered, improper, wrong’. So in ancient Greek paranoia meant ‘madness’, and as modern psychiatry developed in the 19th century came to signify a disorder of the mind characterised by hallucinations or delusions of persecution or grandeur.

One of the oldest words in English to incorporate the prefix para- is paralysis. By the high Middle Ages, paralysis had become naturalised in the form palsy.