Even familiar terms, such as “mercurial”, can turn out to embrace opposite meanings.
Just when you think you know a word, it lets you down. That happened with a word last week: four gracious syllables, a strong look, those classic roots, only for the adjective to slip my grip like quicksilver.
In the negative column, try flighty, insidious, untrustworthy. The Macquarie has a bob each way, offering sprightly as well as volatile as cousins. One respondent went further, deeming mercurial to mean “unpredictable, possibly deranged ,” a reference to the mercury-mad milliners of yore. Lewis Carroll enshrined the association at his Wonderland tea-party, the hatter nerve-shot by the mercurous nitrate used to cure felt.
Turning to the gods, Mercury was the gofer of his day, the Roman messenger with winged sandals who yo-yoed between Jupiter and the hordes. His name’s origins lie in mercari – to trade – making the emissary the Deliveroo among deities, reliable on a good day, or equally prone to disaster.Lustre came later in the guise of the planet, as well as the shimmering metal: dual bodies of mystery and strange powers. The first next-door to the sun, the other like a liquid form of light.
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