After a banquet in Dionysus’s honour Staphylus died of the first fatal hangover. As compensation, and in their honour, Dionysus named bunches of grapes staphylos, alcoholic liquid and drunkenness methe and the grape itself botrys. Science has taken these names and immortalized them in a way that splendidly exemplifies the continuing relationship between Greek myth and our language. When nineteenth-century biologists looked down their microscopes and saw a bacterium with a tail, from which clusters of grape-like nodules sprouted, they called it Staphylococcus. ‘Methylated spirits’ and ‘methane’
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