diamond
This weekend I watched Diamonds Are Forever for podcast reasons and was reminded that diamond has some surprising etymological connections. The word came into English in the 1300s, apparently spelled either as we spell it now or as diamaunt and used even back then to refer to the hard sparklies. It comes to English from the Old French diamont, which comes from the Medieval Latin diamantem, which comes from the Vulgar Latin adiamanetm, which comes from the Latin adamentem, meaning “the hardest metal” initially but just “diamond” later. That Latin word comes from the Greek adamas, which referred to “a hypothetical hardest material,” itself a noun form of the adjective meaning “unbreakable, inflexible” according to Etymonline and “unconquerable, untamable” according to Wikipedia.
If you are an X-Men fan, however, you may have already realized the connection to adamantium, a fictional manmade steel alloy that exists in the Marvel universe and that is the substance with which Wolverine’s skeleton was augmented, making him harder-hitting and turning retractable bone claws into his trademark metal ones. In creating adamantium for Marvel, the writers were presumably drawing on the history of adamant (or adamantine) in folklore and mythology. Some versions of Ezekiel 3:9 have God referring to adamant, while others instead use diamond. And the sword that Cronus uses to castrate his father, Uranus, in Greek mythology is said in some tellings to be adamantine. I had been under the impression that Excalibur itself was made of adamant, but apparently that exists in my brain as a result of an invention of the video game Final Fantasy IV, where adamant is the core material you need before a blacksmith can forge you the sword. I’d like to think that this version of it, at least, is a diamond sword, because that would look cool.
Etymonline offers a slightly different history for adamant, as the mythical metal but also an adjective meaning “hard,” noting that adamant comes from the Old English aðamans, meaning “a very hard stone,” which comes from the Old French adamant, meaning “diamond” but also “magnet.” (Apparently at some point people thought magnets could be blocked by adamant or diamonds or both.) Whereas the etymology for diamond stops with the Greek adamas, the one for adamant goes on to conjecture that perhaps the word at one point meant “invincible, indomitable,” with the a- meaning “not” and daman meaning “to conquer, to tame,” from the Proto Indo-European root that actually gives English the word tame. Or then again maybe it’s something else:
“But semantically, the etymology is rather strange,” according to Beekes, who suggests it might be a foreign word altered in Greek by folk etymology, and compares Akkadian (Semitic) adamu.
The entry does define adamu. Wiktionary says it can mean “blood” or “red earth” but also links it to the name Adam, which Wiktionary says can mean “red soil” specifically, though Etymonline just says “ground,” without mentioning color. Finally, Etymonline says that it’s Ovid who may have linked adamant with magnets, perhaps “through confusion with Latin adamare ‘to love passionately,’” and little bits of metal who love each other passionately is maybe the cutest way to think about magnets ever. Good one, Ovid.