Ichneutymon #5: Fantasy

March 7, 2025 - 3 minutes read - 482 words

“Love is a cunning weaver of fantasies and fables” -Sappho

I cannot for the life of me find the original for this “quote.” I found the quote on a list of quotes about “fantasy,” but I’ve looked at numerous translations and this is either an outright fabrication or a very loose translation. I don’t know Sappho’s corpus very well, so it could be operator error, but I liked the quote regardless.

I was thinking about the word “fantasy” and related words, and wanted to share those thoughts. The word comes into English from Greek φαντασία (phantasia), “appearing, appearance; imagination.” This is a verbal noun from the verb φαίνειν (phainein), meaning “to bring to light, cause to appear,” and is also related to the verb φαντάζειν (phantazein), “to make visible, present to the eye/mind” (in the passive, φαντάζεσθαι [phantazesthai], “to appear, become visible”). We get all sorts of words directly from φαίνειν, such as “phenomena” (= φαινόμενα phainomena, “things which appeared”), “theophany” (θεός theos, “god” + -φανία phania = “the appearance of a god”), “phenotype” (“Any observable characteristic of an organism, such as its morphological, developmental, biochemical or physiological properties, or its behavior,” thanks Wiktionary), but even more through the derivative φαντάζειν (which literally means “to make visible [φαντός phantos]).

So a “fantasy” is something which “appears” in one’s mind, typically, in our understanding of the word, and that is the predominant significance now, mostly referring to “unreal” ideas people might have, or of course a whole genre of writing. But when we look at this word, we uncover even more interesting words: phantasm, also related, from Greek φάντασμα phantasma, “apparition, phantom.” Akin is also the word phantom, which is its doublet and comes from the same Greek root. I love the movie Phantasm personally, which heavily involves characters “seeing things” that do not, or at least should not, exist. Another amusing lesser-known reference is the Imperial officer Captain Phasma in the newer Star Wars trilogy (= Greek φάσμα phasma, “apparition, phantom; phenomenon”). The renowned Plautus comedy, Mostellaria (The Ghost or The Haunted House), is also sometimes called Phasma (for more on this, check out the hilarious movie Something Funny Happened on the Way to the Forum). And think of the now-renowned, but contemporary bomb, Disney’s Fantasia, chock full of unreal, dreamy scenes!

Note that we have an -f- in the word now, in English, rather than the original Greek -ph- from φ. If you read earlier English sources, though, you’ll also see it spelled phantasy or sometimes even phantasie (cf. fairy, faerie, faery; y -> ie is fairly common). If you want to sound deliberately archaic, why not revert to the original ph-?

I just think it’s very cool that all of this came from one little word, φαίνω, a very, very old word by all accounts, and exploded into all sorts of collateral and related vocabulary! Thanks for reading, friends <3