Eep. In the process of removing angsty/trollish nodework. Bear with me, folks. This might take a while...
Take note of the
name:
Cronus.
Now, please
compare two words,
Khronos and
Khronys.
They don't look very much alike, do they? But these two words (and the difference between them) are responsible for a fairly long-lasting social meme, Father Time.
Yes, that's right, folks, that
staple of
New Year's Eve parties, that
crazy old man with the
beard, the
scythe, and the
hourglass, is
a figment of our collective imagination brought about by someone who was probably drinking a
little too much retsina as he flipped through his copy of Aeschylus.
What's this, you say? (Well, probably not, but bear with me....)
Khronos, for those of us fortunate enough to have avoided taking multiple years of
Ancient Greek, is the word for
time;
chronometer and
chronology both come from it.
Khronys, on the other hand, is a
direct transliteration into
English of the name of the world's creator, according to the Ancient Greeks.
Cronus is the
Latinized (
bastardized) version that most people are familiar with.
The haple
^h^h^h^h^h translator took bits and pieces of the legends attached to both mythological concepts-- the
scythe Khronys used to
cut off his father's genitalia, and the
hourglass, a fairly universal symbol of the passage of time-- and melded them together into a slightly confused whole. And voila! A new tradition is created through improper spelling.
I'll be quiet now...