Artophagous

Artophagous (pronounced are-tof-ah-guss)

Bread-eating.

1790s: The construct was the Ancient Greek ἄρτος (ártos) (a cake or loaf of wheat bread and, (collectively) bread) +‎ -phagous.  The Greek ártos was of unknown origin though probably borrowed from a substrate; it should be compared with the Basque arto (id) and the Old Spanish artal (a type of empanada).  Despite the structural similarity, etymologists concluded the suggestion it might be a borrowing from the Proto-Iranian arta- (flour) (thus connected to the Persian آرد (ârd) (id) is less likely because the Greek form predated both, being already attested in Mycenean thus unable formally to be derived from the same Indo-European root the Iranian stems from.  The suffix –phagous was from the Latin -phagus, from the Ancient Greek -φάγος (-phágos) (-eating), from φαγεῖν (phageîn) (to eat).  It was used to form adjectives meaning “eating” or “feeding on”.  The synonym was –vorous.  The more common version of the suffix today is –phagia, the frequency of use in Modern English explained by the proliferation of terms used in mental health to refer to the consumption of untypical items (ie mostly not food).  The suffix –phagia was from the Ancient Greek -φαγία (-phagía) (and related to -φαγος (-phagos) (eater)), corresponding to φαγεῖν (phageîn) (to eat), infinitive of ἔφαγον (éphagon) (I eat), which serves as aorist for the defective verb ἐσθίω (esthíō) (I eat).

Lindsay Lohan with bread on the syndicated Rachael Ray Show, April 2019.

Apparently, in the writings of the more self-consciously erudite, the word artophagous, which enjoyed some currency in the nineteenth century, was still in occasional use as late as the 1920s but most lexicographers now either ignore it or list it as archaic or obsolete.  It’s an example of a word which has effectively been driven extinct even though the practice it describes (the eating of bread) remains as widespread and popular as ever.  Linguistically, this is not uncommon in English and is analogous with the famous remark by Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani (1930–2021; Saudi Arabian minister of petroleum and mineral resources 1962-1986): “The Stone Age came to an end not for a lack of stones, and the Oil Age will end, but not for a lack of oil.” (the first part of that paraphrased usually as the punchier: “The Stone Age did not end because the world ran out of rocks.”)

Bread remains one of the world’s most widely consumed foods and for many probably the most essential source of carbohydrates yet the word “artophagous” began to disappear from all but the longest dictionaries, lexicographers noting the trend in the US in the 1950s and elsewhere in the English-speaking world within a few years.  All conclude it was cut as part of the cull of words which had (1) fallen into decades of disuse and (2) alternatives were well-accepted and in common use (in this case, most obviously the unambiguous “bread eating”).  There’s a bias somewhere (either among those on the editorial committees of dictionaries or in the wider population) because there’s still often an entry for the adjective creophagous (flesh-eating or carnivorous).  Creophagous was from the Ancient Greek kreophagos, the construct being κρέας (kreas) (flesh; meat) + -φαγος (-phagos) –from φαγεῖν (phagein) (to eat)."  What’s curious in that in modern use “carnivorous” (meaning much the same thing but from Latin roots) has attained great popularity yet creophagous retains more lexicographical support despite being barely more used than artophagous.  To add insult to injury, worldwide, there are more bread-eaters than flesh-eaters so something is going on.

There are many references to bread in the Christian Bible.  In Matthew 4:4 Jesus, while being tempted by the devil, rebukes him by saying “Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.”  In that, Jesus was quoting Deuteronomy 8:3, reminding the devil we are to obey God, walk humbly before him, and rely on him; combating the need to satisfy the flesh.  In saying “Man cannot live by bread alone” Jesus wasn’t speaking literally in the vein of a dietician but was making the point a human being as a whole needs sustenance: body, soul, and spirit.  In Genesis 2:7 it was written: “Then the LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground.  He breathed the breath of life into the man’s nostrils, and the man became a living person” which means we are more than just material beings and the essence of us is the life God breathed into us. Since our source of life is from God, bread (a synecdoche for food) alone isn’t enough to sustain us.

The temptation of Christ came during the forty days and forty nights he spent hungry in the wilderness and his point of comparison was the forty years the Israelites endured in the desert mentioned in Deuteronomy 8:1-3: “The whole commandment that I command you today you shall be careful to do, that you may live and multiply, and go in and possess the land that the Lord swore to give to your fathers. And you shall remember the whole way that the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, that he might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments or not. And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord”.