Bear Belly

The delightful Anu Garg, who writes Word-of-the-Day offers today ursiform, having the shape of a bear. I easily guessed this one, not because of all the church Latin I forgot, but because of Ursa Major, the Great Bear constellation. I think of the roundish belly of a teddy bear (yes, named for the President Teddy). Garg also offers a comment on those who love teddy bears, who are arctophiles. But wait, arc is from the Greek form of of L. ursa which was arctos. So that led me to the Arctic, certainly not literally. The Arctic, is the land of the Great Bear, Ursa Major, which circles around in the northern sky. So the Arctic is named for a bear, but not the polar bear which lives up there but for the bear who lives up there in the sky. The southern polar region is the Antarctic, sort of anti-arctic, opposite of the northern bear and there are no polar bears down there either. You might call the Antarctic the nether region, because nether is unrelated to north but refers to down below, like the nether regions down below your belt. And as for Teddy Roosevelt, he was not an arctophile, rather he liked to shoot real bears. He passed on shooting one particular bear who had been tied to a tree by the president’s companions and thus begat the teddy bear toy, a symbol of kindness and sympathy.