Elon Musk is a well-known business tycoon and investor, who has recently made an offer to purchase Twitter. He has founded SpaceX, is CEO of Tesla, and has a net worth of over $200 billion. Many news articles describe his business temperament and personality as mercurial. Shoaib Daniyal is quoted in the Anchorage Daily News (May 14, 2002), “There’s a lot of hate on Twitter, especially directed at minorities. And so there’s always a constant battle to get Twitter to clamp down on hate speech, very often violent hate speech and fake news,” says Shoaib Daniyal, associate editor with the Indian news website Scroll. “It’s fairly filled with hate anyway,” he says. “And Twitter hasn’t done a lot about it. So let’s see where it goes.” Which, given Musk’s mercurial nature, could be almost any direction at all.”
Mercurial means to be characterized by rapid and unpredictable changeableness. The word is derived from the Latin mercurius which was morphed into English as mercury in the 1300s. Mercurius was the Roman god of commerce, eloquence, travel, cunning, and theft. He functioned as a messenger for the gods, characterized by rapid flying and unpredictable movements. Mercury was often portrayed with winged sandals and a traveler’s hat. He was the Roman equivalent to the Greek god Hermes.
On one of his Christian missionary trips St. Paul was compared to Hermes by the citizens of Lystra. Acts chapter 14 records, “And when the crowds saw what Paul had done, they lifted up their voices, saying in Lycaonian, “The gods have come down to us in the likeness of men!” Barnabas they called Zeus, and Paul, Hermes, because he was the chief speaker.”
Mercury was also the Roman name of the planet closest to the sun. The Romans knew of seven bright objects in the sky: the Sun, the Moon, and the five brightest planets. They named them after their most important gods. Because Mercury was the fastest planet as it moved around the Sun, it was named after the Roman messenger god Mercurius.
A silver-white metal, liquid at ordinary temperatures, was also called by the name mercury because of its changeableness. The poisonous heavy metal is used in batteries and scientific instruments such as thermometers and barometers.
Mercury is the only element to retain its alchemical name into modern times. Alchemy is the ancient knowledge of natural philosophy and protoscience. Studied in China, India, and the Middle East as the art of purifying materials and curing diseases, alchemy came to Europe as the pseudo ability of attempting to turn base metals into precious metals.
With this history of the word, mercurial has also been used to describe qualities of eloquence, ingenuity, and thievishness, reflecting qualities of the god Mercury. In the 14th century a person born under the astrological sign of the planet Mercury was thought to have an unpredictable changeableness of mood throughout life.
In the business world employees may describe their boss's mood as mercurial because they never know how the person in charge is going to react to anything. I have discovered that my two, going on three, year old granddaughter is also very mercurial. On one visit with us she will eat little but cucumbers and the next time, after buying an extra 3 pack of cucumbers, she snubs her nose at them and desire mangoes. The next visit the food of choice is crackers with peanut butter. You never know what may come next. Given Elon Musk’s antics of late it is easy to see how this adjective aptly describes him and his business actions.
One might wonder, does Elon Musk see himself as some kind of god?
Columnist John Kreutzwieser loves to research words and writes this weekly Word Wisdom column for Moose Jaw Express/MooseJawToday.com. He has an interest in the usage, origin, and relevance of words for society today. Greek and Latin form the basis of many words, with ancient Hebrew shedding light on word usage.
John would like to know if anyone has a sincere interest in a relevant word that he could possibly research for an upcoming column. If so, please send your requests to wordwisdom2021@gmail.com . Words will be selected according to relevance and research criteria. We cannot confirm that all words will be used.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the position of this publication.
