I think of that old joke every time I see a Cooper’s Hawk.
Admittedly, it’s a roundabout process: the Cooper’s Hawk is an accipiter, “accipiter” is a Latin word, and as we all know, that word is derived from the verb accipio, “I seize.” I know, they don’t eat much fruit; but who can resist the thrill of mentally juggling a birdhawk, Shakespeare, and Flip Wilson?
Uh-oh. I just wrote “as we all know.” A very, very bad sign.
The etymology from “accipio” is an ancient one. Here is Isidore of Seville, who died 1,337 years ago last week (my translation, as always):
The accipiter is a bird better armed in its spirit than in its claws, bearing great courage in rather a small body. It has taken its name from accipiendo, that is to say, from taking. And this is a bird very eager to seize other birds, and thus it is called “seizer,” that is to say, raptor.
Gregory the Great, who, incidentally, dedicated his Moralia in Job to Isidore’s brother Leander, refers to the same notion:
We sometimes say “accipere” for “to take away,” whence we call “accipiters” those birds that seize others.
It’s hard to imagine more authoritative authorities than those, but that doesn’t mean they’re right. A noun formed on the Latin verb should have come out “acceptor,” a word that exists, of course, but apparently not ever in the meaning “a bird that seizes.”
Jacob Theodor Klein, writing in the mid-eighteenth century, tells a different story. The name
is usually derived from the Greek ‘Occypteros, that is to say, having long wings that come to a point.
Klein doesn’t especially like that etymology (he points out that there are lots of birds with long, pointed wings that are not called “accipitres”), but this seems to be the one that has carried the day. Coues, in the Century Dictionary, appears to suggest that the Greek word, attested as early as Homer’s Iliad, was, shall we say, informally altered to appear Latin — exactly the explanation given by the OED.
Neither Coues nor the Oxonians appear to have been aware of what is perhaps the strongest evidence for the Greek, and not Latin, origin of the name.
The gun smokes in the Kyranides, a fourth-century encyclopedia, three books of which make up a zoological treatise. According to Savigny, the Greek encyclopedist in his Book III describes the Sparrowhawk under the title “Ocypteros.” There we have it: the original Greek name applied to precisely the bird that the rest of us call “accipiter.” That fake-Latin name is the result of folk etymology, the assimilation of an incomprehensible term — here a Greek word — to a more comfortable, more familiar, more immediately understandable form — here a made-up “Latin” word that was then furnished with a reassuring, but equally fictitious, etymology.
It worked, for almost fifteen hundred years. Choate and Leahy and, well, everybody, including me, have swallowed the spurious explanation hawk, line, and sinker — until now.
