Pythoness

[Avner Ben]

The following is from the "A Word A Day" newsletter
(http://www.wordsmith.org/awad/subscribe.html) of  22 July 2003. I thought
you'd find it amusing...

>pythoness (PIE-thuh-nis) noun
>
>   1. A woman with the power of divination.
>
>   2. The priestess of Apollo at Delphi in Greek mythology.
>
>[Ultimately from Greek puthon (python).]
>
>  "The coffee finds nothing else in the sack, and so it attacks these
>   delicate and voluptuous linings; it acts like a food and demands
>   digestive juices; it wrings and twists the stomach for these juices,
>   appealing as a pythoness appeals to her god ..."
>   Honore de Balzac; The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee; 1830s.
>   (translated from the French by Robert Onopa)
>
>  "For this was a time when women were privileged, when female
narratologists
>   had skills greatly revered, when there were pythonesses, abbesses and
>   sibyls in the world of narratology, who revealed mysteries and kept
watch
>   at the boundaries of correctness."
>   A S Byatt; The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye; The Paris Review
(Flushing,
>   New York); Winter 1994.
>
>This week's theme: words that aren't what they appear to be.
>

    Avner