"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 13/11/17 (Echo, Pan)

On Friday I talked about the origins of ditto, the ditto punctuation marks, which are, if you like, written echoes of what somebody else has said before or indeed what you have said before. So I thought I would talk about the history of echo because I think Margaret would be like this one. She probably knows it all already, but it's very much indebted to Greek mythology, which of course we've heard about today. It goes back to another nymph, in fact. Echo was a mountain nymph known as an oread and it's said that the goddess Hera really didn't like the way that Echo used to gossip and chat the whole time and so she deprived her of speech, apart to the ability to repeat what other people had said to her. So that was Hera's revenge for somebody who was a bit of a tittle-tattle. So poor Echo, who had already had a pretty tough time, then fell in love with the handsome Narcissus who, of course, was only in love with himself and so he didn't return her love. And when he rejected her, she wasted away with grief until there was hothing left of her but her voice. And of course Narcissus himself pined away by worshipping the reflection of himself in the pool. It's said where he died, the Narcissus flowers sprang, which is really quite sweet story. But back to Echo, there's a different story of Echo in which she was loved by the God Pan, but she turned him down so the tables were turned, if you like. In revenge, it's said Pan drove a group of shepherds mad and made them tear her to pieces in an incredibly brutal way. It said that the fragments of her flesh were buried in the earth including her voice which could still imitate other sounds. So poor Echo had an incredibly hard time of it. If you wand to look linguistically, "eche" in the Greek meant sound, simply, so that is probably where it came from, but the mythology obviously so much more colourful. And talking about Pan, the spurned lover in this one. Pan is, of course, behind panic because he was a mischievious thing. He would hide in the forest and makes all sorts of eerie, terrifying noises to frighten passers-by, which is where we get panic from today.