Myths & Parables
Achilles Heel
A critical vulnerability in an otherwise strong position, named after the mythological Greek warrior who was invincible everywhere except his heel.
Gift of the Magi
The parable of a young husband and wife and how they deal with the challenge of buying secret Christmas gifts for each other with very little money, where they each sell items they own (watch and hair) to buy gifts for the other that, as it turns out in a twist ending, are no longer useful to the other (a watch chain a combs, respectively), an example of comic irony.
Halcyon Days
A nostalgic reference to a past period remembered as happy, peaceful, and successful.
Hero's Journey
A common mythological narrative template in which a hero departs on an adventure, faces a decisive crisis, wins a victory, and returns home changed or transformed.
Hurkle-Durkle
An 18th-century Scottish term for lounging in bed long after it's time to get up. A charming word for a universal guilty pleasure.
Ouroboros
The symbol and idea of a snake eating its own tail, often interpreted as a cycle of rebirth and renewal.
Pandora's Box
An artifact in Greek mythology where an object that is originally seen as a gift turns out to in fact be a curse. The only thing remaining at the bottom of Pandora's Box is 'Hope.'
Rumpelstiltskin Effect
The phenomenon where giving something a name — a fear, a feeling, a diagnosis — reduces its power and makes it feel more manageable.
Ship of Theseus
Theseus's Paradox
A thought experiment that asks whether an object that has had every one of its parts gradually replaced is still fundamentally the same object.
Sisyphean Task
A laborious, seemingly endless effort that ultimately leads nowhere — named after the mythological king condemned to roll a boulder uphill for eternity.
Stone Soup
Axe Soup · Button Soup · Nail Soup
A folk story in which hungry strangers convince the people of a town to each share a small amount of their food in order to make a meal that everyone enjoys (and whereby the inedible stone can be removed when the neighboring ingredients are sufficient to make an actual soup), and exists as a moral regarding the value of sharing.
Sword of Damocles
A parable from the Greek Classical era of man who is offered to sit in on the King's throne for a, with a sword above him held only by a single hair, an allusion to the imminent and ever-present peril faced by those in positions of power.
Turtles All the Way Down
Infinite Regress · Unmoved Mover
An expression of the problem of needing something to explain something to explain something, etc., where the expression alludes to the mythological idea of a World Turtle that supports the earth on its back, and then the question being asked of what supports \*that\* turtle.
Ur
A prefix denoting the first, earliest, or most archetypal form of something.