Transcript for the Piece Audio version of salamander - word of the day

This is the etymology moment, and I'm Charles Hodgson. Today we'll hear the story behind the word salamander.
In his play Henry IV, Shakespeare has Falstaff call Bardolph's face a salamander. Why would he do that? A salamander is a kind of slimy lizard and I checked to see that my memory serves me correctly?it does?one notable fact about salamanders is that they can disconnect their tails from their bodies in order to run away, and grow a new tail. There has been a mythology about salamanders that goes back to the ancient Greeks and it is from the ancient Greeks that we get the word salamander too. That myth is that salamanders can walk through fire or even like to live in fire. Because of this myth there is a heraldic device that involves a salamander surrounded by flames, King Francis I of France made it his own. His motto was nutrisco et extinguo which was Latin and supposed to evoke "I nourish the good and extinguish the bad." Francis died less than two decades before Shakespeare was born and the reason he chose a salamander in flames along with this motto was that salamanders were thought not only to be able to live among the flames, but to be able to cool them with their bodies as well. All of this mythology is supposed to have arisen because in fact salamanders usually would prefer a damp and soggy place to hang out than in glowing coals, and as I said before, they are themselves kind of slimy creatures. The theory is that in ages past people would heap a little wood on the fire to chase away the cold winter chill. As they sat warming their toes and staring into the flames, there would appear a little salamander running out of the hearth. The reason the salamander was running was that he was running for his life. He'd been asleep in his nice damp log when suddenly someone had set fire to it. To protect himself he had exuded mucous through his skin and legged it out of there. But the ancients, not equipped with flashlights to find the sorry little guy in the dark, assumed the salamander liked the flames, since that was the place he was seen most often. So salamanders became associated also with fires and things glowing bright red, which is what was the condition Bardolph's face was after a bout of drinking when Falstaff called his face a salamander.