Fox (part 2)

Last time, we took a look at the phrase sly as a fox. Today, let’s look at how slyly the word fox has insinuated itself into certain words.

alopecia: A medical term for baldness. <1398> [L. alopecia, from Gr. alopekia, fox-mange, from alopeks, a fox.]

salep: A nutritive meal, starch, or jelly made from the dried tubers of various orchidaceous plants, chiefly those of the genus Orchis; formerly also used as a drug. <1736> [Arabic thaleb (pronounced in some parts saleb), taken to be a shortening of khasyu 'tha-thalab orchis, literally “fox's testicles.”]

vixen: the female of the fox. <1410> [OE. fyxen, fem. of fox]

Vulpecula: A small northern constellation lying between Hercules and Pegasus; more fully called Vulpecula et anser (fox and goose) or cum ansere. <1866> [L. vulpecula, diminutive of vulpes, fox.]

vulpicide: One who kills a fox other than by hunting it with hounds. <1826> [L. vulpi-, vulpes, fox + -cide.]

vulpine: Characteristic of a fox; similar to that of a fox. <1628> [L. vulpinus, f. vulpes, fox]

Winnebago: Siouan people of eastern Wisconsin. <1766> [Fox wi·nepye·ko·ha, literally “person of dirty water,” an allusion to the muddy waters of the Fox River below Lake Winnebago, which became clogged with dead fish in the heat of the summer.]

Zorro: fictional black-clad masked outlaw who defends the people of the land against tyrannical officials and other villains. Zorro was created by Johnston McCulley. <1919> [Sp. for fox.]


SIDEBAR: the red fox

Now available from McFarland & Co.: Word Parts Dictionary, 2nd edition


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Sly as a Fox (pt. 1)

Tanya from Albany, New York, asks what sly as a fox means and where the phrase comes from. For some reason, in earlier centuries, people considered the fox to be a crafty, cunning, and tricky creature. It does tend to slink a bit while hunting, but that quality isn’t limited to foxes; sly as a snake would work for me just as well. But a literary tradition pinned the simile on the pup.

Aesop wrote the fable of The Fox and the Crow, in which a wily fox tricks a crow out of a morsel of meat. Much later, in medieval stories, Reynard the Fox became the symbol of a trickster, a character who was always in trouble but always able to talk his way out of it.

The slyness or subtlety of a fox is an image found frequently in Shakespeare.

• Cymbeline, III, 3: “We are beastly, subtle as the fox for prey . . . .”

• Henry IV, Part 1, V, 2: “For treason is but trusted like the fox,
Who, ne'er so tame, so cherish'd and lock'd up,
Will have a wild trick of his ancestors.”

• Henry VIII, I, 1: “This holy fox, Or wolf, or both,—for he is equal ravenous
As he is subtle . . . .”

• King Lear, III, 4: “False of heart, light of ear, bloody of hand; hog in sloth, fox in stealth . . . .”

• Measure for Measure, III. 2: “. . .and furred with fox and lamb-skins too, to signify, that craft, being richer than innocency, stands for the facing.”

• Venus and Adonis, l. 694: “Uncouple at the timorous flying hare,
Or at the fox which lives by subtlety . . . .”


SIDEBAR: The History of Reynard the Fox


Now available from McFarland & Co.: Word Parts Dictionary, 2nd edition


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Write to Mike with comments or questions:
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(substitute @ for AT above)

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