Leap in the dark

‘They all laughed at Christopher Columbus,’ sang my husband flatly, ‘when he said the world was round.’ I wasn’t going to tell him yet again that George and Ira Gershwin were wrong and everyone knew the world was round when Columbus set off. But there is a connection between Columbus’s name and the leap in the dark that he took in his voyage — and which David Cameron says ‘outers’ want to take today.

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I’ll stick to language, since this is not a political column. That very English word leap has no affinities in languages outside the Germanic family, unless, some scholars say, it is related in origin to the rather different-looking Greek word kolumbos, meaning ‘diver’. Aristophanes used that word in The Birds, and ordinarily it meant rock-dove, like the London pigeon. It is supposed to swim through the air, like a pearl diver in water.