Tuesday, December 13, 2005
Balderdash Blog
Where did the term "stomping ground" originate? Some terms we use came from literal meanings and some are just plain silliness. Can anyone tell me about this one? I think this will be a new random blog insert along with What the Crap episodes. Did people stomp on their home ground? Why did they stomp? What did stomping infer?
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The term "stomping ground" is actually one word in the ancient Greek transliterated: stompoi. It means "to trample about on one's own land." It strongly implies, but does not necessarily mean that the land is owned by the individual doing the stomping, but does maintain that the trampler has some type of emotional and or financial attachment to the land. In many cases, the word stompoi does not even refer to a place of land at all, but in fact it refers to an area such as a city or town, or perhaps a shire, villiage, or suburb. In ancient Corith for example, one Pagan uses this word to refer to the Pagan temples where the temple prostitutes gathered. The meaning of the word stompoi could be taken in a couple of ways here:
1) It could mean that he is somewhat of an ancient near-eastern pimp, having a direct finacnial interest in the goings on of this property, or
2) He just really likes going to the temple parties and participating in the various religious activities that happened to take place there.
One might argue for the later explaination, rather than the former.
I just did some more research and found out that the Greeks had actually stolen the word from the ancient Hebrew word transliterated: chtompah. This word means "God has given us this land so get off of it you Gentile scum." I'm not quite certain how the connection to the Greek is made here, but thought you might want to know.
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