Chinese scientists announced this week that they had caused pigs that contain functioning monkey cells to be born, which was not an attempt to breed cleverer bacon but simply the unprecedented production of, as the lingo has it, a monkey-pig “chimera”.
The word “chimera” is often used these days simply to mean something that is impossible, for instance a unicorn made of crisps or a Brexit that is good for the economy. But properly speaking it means a fantastical beast composed of bits from different animals, after a fire-breathing monster in Greek mythology that had the head of a lion, the body of a goat and a serpent’s tail. (“Chimera” is the Greek for a female goat.) In Milton’s Paradise Lost, Hell is a place of “Gorgons and hydras and chimeras dire”.
Subsequently, a chimera came to mean a misleading fantasy or delusion. As the astrologer who had dreamed of controlling the weather in Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas ruefully admits: “I can now see how fatally I betrayed my quiet, by suffering chimeras to prey upon me in secret.” In this sense, readers may agree, there remain many more chimeras in the modern world than newfangled monkey-pigs.
• Steven Poole’s A Word for Every Day of the Year is published by Quercus.
