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𓆸 𓀓 𓆹
Today there’s a gym on just about every second corner of our fitness-conscious metropolises and minipolises…only mostly these days many of them tend to go more by the handle “fitness centre” or “health club” (“Just Fitness”, “Fitness Extra”, “Fastrack Fitness”, “Planet Fitness”, “Health and Fitness 24/7”, etc)…rather than the more old school term “gym”, which has gritty, working class connotations. But I wonder how many of the exercise junkies and muscle-exerters and extenders that frequent these establishments realise that the vernacular word “gym” is shorthand for a much more ancient institution and word?
“Gym” of course comes originally from “gymnasium”. Like so many things of an intellectual, linguistic and cultural bent it started with the ancient Greeks. The Greek gymnasion was a school for naked men-only thank you exercise and physical feats§. The word comes originally from gymnós (meaning “naked”) and arrived at its modern form via gymnazein (“exercise naked”) and Latin adaptation as gymnasium.
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| Greek gymnasium at Sardis, Turkey |
“Gymnasium’s” lexical life doesn’t end there, the prefix gymn- or gymnos- (meaning “naked”; “bare”; “exposed”), derived from it, has provided the framework for an eclectic mix of neologisms, from the most obvious, gymnastics and gymnast, to others, some of which are more exotic, more tangential word-creations. The off-shoots include Gymnoplast (a mass of protoplasm without an enclosed wall); Gymnocarpous (“naked” fruit); Gymnodinium (a type of aquatic plankton sans protective armour); Gymnosophist (a group of ancient Jainist philosophers who pranced about starkers in India, refusing to don clothes); Gymnogynomania (the urge to rip women’s clothes off); Gymnophoria (the insettling sensation that someone is mentally undressing you); and a few biological/zoological gymno- prefix words like Gymnoblastic and Gymnosperm.
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§ sometimes the athletes exercised in narrow strips of loin-cloth (so perhaps “quasi-gymno”)
