To your surprise, today we are going to talk to you about a word in English that comes from Latin that comes from Greek!!!
The word is CORNUCOPIA, which in English means “HORN OF PLENTY». The roots of the word are CORNU (horn) and COPIA (plenty), but the amusing part is the myth behind it!
Well, dear friends, you may know Zeus, who was God of all Gods. When Zeus was born, his mother Rea hid him in a cave in Crete (Ideon Andron, you can visit it today) to save him from his father Kronus , who had the habit of eating his children as soon as they were born in order to protect his throne (hmmmm!). His mother had enough already, so she hid little Zeus there, asked a goat, Amalthea, to feed him with her milk and appointed a group of warriors, the Kourites, to bang their spears on their shields every time little Zeus cried, so that Kronus wouldn’t hear. Surrounded by all that crowd little Zeus grew and grew, until one day, while playing with Amalthea, he broke one of her horns – you get really strong if you drink goat’s milk, you know! Poor Amalthea was very distressed, so Zeus promised her that the broken horn would always be full of all the goods she desired.
Later on, in Roman mythology, the horn became the symbol of goddess Copia, the personification of plenty and nowadays it is used to refer to an abundance of something!
The moral (-s) of this story are: drink goat’s milk, it’s good for you.
Don’t eat your children; it’s bad for you and nature.