"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 07/02/18 (lemure)

We've been talking recently about spirits and demons from folklore and myth and most of the words - ogres, imps, devils themselves, you would expect to be on the list, but I don'r think you would put this word on the list of spooky things and that is the animal, the lemur. Because lemur actually means "spirit of the dead" in Latin and there's quite a story behind it. They were given their name by Carl Linnaeus and he was the founder of the names of many of our animals. And he was clearly familiar with mythology and the works of Roman poets like Virgil and Ovid. In Roman tradition, lemures, rhymes with "please", were believed to be the ghosts of all those who have not been afforded proper burial rites or had died leaving unfinished business behind them. And ultimately, there were ghosts of lots of people from sailors who had been lost at sea, from suicides, who weren't then granted a proper burial, to murder victims, criminals who had been executed in some grisly way, so lot og unquiet souls who were said to haunt the streets of Rome looking for peace and looking for solace. It's the same sort of ideology, I suppose, that's behind the idea of ghosts today. The idea is that they would rise at night and, as I say, walk along the srteets haunting their former homes neighbourhoods. It's quite a sort of spooky idea. But from there, if you skip forward a few millennia, the Swedish naturalist  I mentioned, Carl Linnaeus, entered a record of the creature that he called the lemur in his Systema Nature - that was his book, as I say, in which he created a lot of the names from Latin for the animals that we know today. Why did he do it? It seems a bit of weird chioce, but he says, "I call them lemures because they go around mainly by nights in the certain way similar to humans and roam with a slow pace". So despite all their cuteness, he obviously saw something quite spooky, perhaps their expressive eyes, their nocturnal habits, sort of humanlike expression that they take on as if they're lost souls, that made him go all the way back to mythology to choose his word. I love that, sort of ancient Rome's creepiest ghosts really haunting the streets of Rome have inspired the lemurs that we know today.