I’m sure you’ve heard this before.

Q: What kind of noise annoys an oyster?

A: A noisy noise annoys an oyster.

The etymology of oyster may not have anything to do with noise, but it is true that oysters have to some extent been associated with quiet. Mark Twain seems to have been the first writer to call someone who didn’t talk much an oyster. I’m not sure if this is because oysters themselves are quiet creatures, or because they like to keep their traps tightly shut.

The etymology of oyster does however have something to do with them keeping their traps shut. At least it is the hardness of their shells that comes into it, if not the difficulty in prying them apart.

Oyster first shows up in English before there was any written record so that it was firmly there when the Old English documents that still survive were penned. It came to English from Latin and shows up in a bunch of other Germanic languages as well. I guess everyone was eating them.

The Romans got the word—which actually was pronounced ostrea in Latin—from the usual source; Greek. But the word root goes back to Indo-European. That’s where the connection with the hardness of the shell began, although it is apparent in Latin too.

The os- in the oyster word root is the same os- as in osteoporosis. Osteoporosis is a disorder of the bones and os- means “bone.”

In the podictionary episode on the word ostracize I talked about how the shells of oysters found their way into that word meaning “to shun” someone. (That was a while ago October 2005)

Not only have oysters been associated with silence both in antiquity and in Mark Twain’s day, they have also been looked on with alternating disgust and hope. Jonathan Swift who wrote Gulliver’s Travels said

“he was a bold man who first eat an oyster.”

Ambrose Bierce called oysters “slimy.” One of the meanings of oyster I see in the Oxford English Dictionary is too revolting to go into.

And yet there is a salty seductiveness to oysters that perpetuates their reputation as an aphrodisiac.

These days we might say that things are different as from each other as apples and oranges. But oranges came to England millennia after oysters and for centuries the phrase was as different as apples and oysters.

Shakespeare was the first to document the now familiar phrase the world is your oyster and this seems not to relate to any bone hardness of life, nor delicacy for your eating. Instead it’s a hopeful phrase along the lines that once you open things up you might find a pearl inside.

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