Tuesday, September 10, 2019

What do you call a mermaid with an octopus half?

Years ago I wrote a post about how the neologism "cecaelia" commonly used for octopus-mermaids on the internet is actually meaningless gibberish. I still believe that, but in this post I wanted to play with folk etymology.

The girl's name Celia is a short form of both Caelia ("heavenly") and Cecilia ("blind, dim-sighted"). The otherwise gibberish name "cecaelia" sounds like it might be a play on these names.

Caelius ("heavenly") and Caecilius ("blind; invisible") were both Roman family names. Perhaps the name of the species is actually something like cilophyte (see my old post for an etymology analysis), but some families of cilophytes have surnames like Caelius or Caecilius. After some confusion while talking with fishermen, the surnames end up being mangled and mistakenly refer to the entire species.

Or perhaps the name derives from a phrase like "Ecce Caelia!" meaning "Look Caelia!" (where Caelia is the person being addressed) or "Here is Caelia."

Or it might be derived from caelo ("I carve") + -ia (abstract suffix), meaning something like "carvery."

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