i was trying to find the ancient greek work for pumpkin because Halloween and instead i found this gem
Oh man it gets even better. It’s a pun that works in English too.
One time I was explaining the ancient Romans to R (this took some doing) because he saw me reading The Twelve Caesars, and I had to explain this word to him, because it’s the title of (as mentioned above) a work by Seneca, the biography of Claudius.
When a Roman emperor died, they experienced “apotheosis” – becoming a god. When Claudius died, the joke Seneca made was that he was such a buffoon he experienced apocolocyntosis.
Not becoming a god, but becoming a gourd.
R laughed so hard when I explained this that he almost crashed the car, and for WEEKS afterward I would know when he was sharing the joke because he’d text me to remind him of how to spell apocolocyntosis.
I have a sudden urge to change my url to screaming-towards-apocolocyntosis
I wasn’t going to ever say this but literally every time I see your URL I think of apocolocyntosis.