Word of the Week: Europe

Europe: noun. 1: The 2nd smallest continent (actually a vast peninsula of Eurasia); the British use "Europe" to refer to all of the continent except the British Isles. (Etymology: Latin, from Greek Europa: a Phoenician princess carried off by Zeus in the form of a white bull.) - Princeton University WordNet.

SOMEONE has complained I often use American dictionaries, but I like the offbeat results. Only a US source would note (correctly) that the Brits don’t actually include themselves as European. The week has seen lots of parties to celebrate the accession of ten new members to the European Union. Alas, there will be no parties in the Turkish part of Cyprus - they were rejected as members by the Greek Cypriots.

You can blame the EU on the ancient Greeks. Europa was the daughter of Agenor, king of Phoenicia. She was kidnapped by Zeus (disguised unconvincingly as a bull) and spirited off to Crete to be ravished, and also found the first "European" civilisation, the Minoans. There has long been a theory that Crete and the Minoans are the origin of the myth of Atlantis, but this week US explorers claimed they had found the real Atlantis off the coast of Cyprus. Unfortunately, it appears to lie in Famagusta Bay, near the Turkish zone, so there’s no hope of getting into the EU for a while.

One intriguing implication of EU enlargement is that it will make the Union more Anglophile, as most of the accession countries have English as their second language. Indeed, two of the ten are ex-British colonies, Malta and Cyprus. There will also be 162 new MEPs to claim daily expenses. Incidentally, a poll this week asked Scots which countries were joining the EU. One in ten picked "Luvania", a fictional place invented by the pollsters. However, Luvian is actually an ancient Indo-European language of Anatolian origins. In Hittite, it means Anatolia or present- day Turkey. If Turkish Cyprus had joined the EU, we could all claim to know more than the pollsters.

I can’t finish without recording that this week the f-word was uttered for the first time during a debate in the Scottish Parliament. Predictably, the subject was the EU and fishing. The redoubtable Kenny MacAskill just couldn’t contain his ire at what the EU had done for Scottish fishermen. Which was not a lot, according to Kenny.