cyprine

I promise not every post will be Sailor Moon-related, but this show happens to be where I’m lately encountering words I don’t know. Bear with me.

On Sailor Moon, many characters are named after minerals, and Cyprine is a blue-haired villain who debuts late in the third season, presumably taking her name from a sky blue-colored variety of the mineral vesuvianite. When I looked up this word, however, I was surprised to find that not only could it be defined as “of or pertaining to the cypress” but also in French it can mean “vaginal lubrication or vaginal fluid.” That seems like a lot of meaning for one word to contain, and I wasn’t clear if these were two different words with identical spellings or if all the meanings are related.

Regarding the sense of this word referring to a type of mineral, it seems to come from the Latin cyprium, “copper.” According to Etymonline, Latin at one point used the word aes to mean “copper,” but when that word began to be associated also with bronze, which is an alloy of copper and tin, a new word had to be coined to refer specifically to pure copper, and that word was cuprum, a contraction of the cyprium aes, literally “metal from Cypress,” the island where copper was mined.

The island of Cyprus, in turn, takes its name from a Latinized form of the Greek Kypros, literally “land of the cypress tree.” And cypress comes from the Old French cipres, which comes from the Late Latin cypressus, which comes from the Latin cupressus — and all of them seem like they might be related to the other words previously discussed in this post, but alas, it seems they are not, because the Greek kyparissos is presumed to come from an unknown pre-Greek Mediterranean language. 

So where does vaginal fluid come into this, so to speak? Well, Wiktionary traces the etymology of this sense of cyprine back to the Ancient Greek kupris, that being an epithet for Aphrodite. In Latin, cyprinus refers to a type of carp, and it’s alleged that Aristotle himself tied the fish to Aphrodite because the fish is known for being super fertile and the name is a reference to the fact that Aphrodite was allegedly born on Cyprus. In case you’re looking at all these c-words and wondering if carp itself might share an etymology with anything else I’ve mentioned, it apparently doesn’t; it entered the Romance languages via Latin from a Germanic source.

I think the most common story for how Aphrodite was “born” involves Cronus cutting off the testicles of Uranus and one fluid or another dripping into the ocean, causing Aphrodite to spring forth from the water. Some explanations for her name link her to the Greek aphros, “foam,” but Etymonline implies that this may be a folk etymology and that it may instead come from the names of older religious figures, such as the Phoenician deity Ashtaroth or the Assyrian deity Ishtar. However, there is another story of Aphrodite’s origin, saying that she was born more conventionally in Paphos, a city in Cyprus, and it’s for this reason that, for example, Sappho sometimes just refers to Aphrodite with the epithet Cyprian. But the fact that Cyprus is known for both Aphrodite and copper seems like enough to link Aphrodite to copper.

This all ties very nicely back to Sailor Moon, however, because the character most associated with Aphrodite — Sailor Venus, because Venus is the Roman counterpart to Aphrodite — is also associated with metal. In the context of the show, I think it’s specifically supposed to be gold, as in the kind of metal that might be given as a token of love, like you’d find in jewelry. But Sailor Venus is also color-coded with a shade of yellow that’s closer to orange — coppery, if you will.

This concludes my discussion of etymology as it relates to Sailor Moon, or at least until I encounter a new word I don’t know.