Around 2600 years ago there lived a poet by the name of Sappho.

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This was a period when Greece was at its classical peak after a dark age and although her life can only be speculated at based on the fragments of news that come down to us through the ages, Sappho appears to have been a rock star of the age.

When she rolled into town the city of Syracuse built her a statue.

During the time when she wasn’t out on the road touring she seems to have been a school teacher or a headmistress at a girls’ school.

Her poetry is highly praised by the classicists who swoon over its lyrical beauty.

Of course her work is in ancient Greek but there have been English translations and one thing that’s for sure is that you can get some pretty different wording of the same little poem depending on who did the translation.

In some of her poetry she sweetly goes on about the charms of girls and people in the centuries following have practically gotten into fistfights over whether she was simply a honey of a schoolmarm with a talent for the written word who was singing the praises of her students; or rather, the type of gal who just liked gals.

In the end it doesn’t really matter.  The fact is that her reputation as a gal who liked gals spawned a word for this female homosexual—and that word is…

sapphian.

No, really, it’s true, look it up.

She also happened to have been from a certain island in Greece called Lesbos and that prompted a more popular word for this same love that dared not speak its name—and that’s today’s podictionary word lesbian, from the island of Lesbos.

For about two and a half millennia this love certainly didn’t speak these names in English since sapphism first appears in 1890 and lesbian in 1870.