Odyssey of English: The deadly origins of ‘toxic’

Researchers at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar recently reported that one in eight users of Reddit publish ‘‘toxic content’’, according to an analysis of more than a billion posts and comments on the platform.

As well as suggesting that many netizens and their communications are harmful or unpleasant in some way, this report underlines the fact words continuously evolve to take on new meanings and uses.

The word ‘‘toxic’’ derives from the ancient Greek word for bow (the weapon), toxon. Since the time of the epic poet Homer, author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Greeks used to dip their arrows into poisonous plant juices and snake venom to make them more deadly.

According to tradition, it was the hero Hercules (Herakles in Greek) who first had this idea: he dipped his arrows into the poisonous blood of Hydra after he managed to kill the serpentine water monster as one of his famous Labours.

This action, in fact, eventually led to his own death – but that’s another story. The point here is that the word for bow in Greek eventually became a word to describe the poisonous qualities of the substances its arrows were dipped in. Such drifts in meaning are very normal over the lifespan of a word.

But the story doesn’t end there, for just as nature abhors a vacuum, language abhors a duplicate, and English already had a word for poisonous. When two words are closely related in their meaning or use, they will typically differentiate themselves from one another, each taking on a finer, more nuanced sense. So, in their traditional physical senses, you are much more likely to find ‘‘poisonous’’ used for harmful things in nature, such as snakes, spiders, mushrooms, and toads, while ‘‘toxic’’ is much more commonly used for harmful person-made substances.

But then, sometime around the beginning of the 21st century, toxicity made a leap from the physical to the social.

These days we have toxic assets, toxic masculinity, toxic relationships, and toxic Reddit posts.