Callipygian

Part of speech: adjective

Pronunciation: /ˌkæ.ləˈpɪ.d͡ʒi.ən/

Definitions

  1. Having a beautifully shaped and proportionate rear end is often suggested by this term
  2. This adjective denotes an individual possessing a shapely and visually pleasing backside
  3. Characterized by an attractively contoured and proportioned posterior

Etymology: In a museum in Naples stands a Roman marble Aphrodite who has lifted her robe and is looking back over her shoulder to admire her own bottom. She is the Venus Callipyge, the "Aphrodite of the beautiful buttocks," and English owes her an adjective. The Greek epithet was "kallipygos," built from "kallos," beauty (the root of calligraphy), and "pygē," buttocks. "Kallos" itself derives from the adjective "kalos," beautiful, which also gave us kaleidoscope. It was a real cult title, not a sculptor's joke. Athenaeus, writing around 200 AD, tells of two sisters near Syracuse who argued over which had the finer behind and asked a passing young man to judge. He chose the elder and fell in love with her, and his brother took the younger. The sisters grew rich in marriage and founded a temple to Aphrodite Kallipygos. The Naples statue is a Roman copy of a lost Hellenistic original. It surfaced in Rome in the sixteenth century, entered the great Farnese collection, and moved to Naples in the eighteenth. Its fame rests partly on a modern hand. The original head was missing, and the one she wears was carved by restorers who decided she should be gazing back at herself. The famous over-the-shoulder glance that gives the figure its knowing wit is a Renaissance and eighteenth-century guess. Grand Tour travellers made the statue a celebrity, and its nickname followed them home. By the early nineteenth century English had formed "callipygian" by adding the suffix "-ian," which descends from Latin "-ianus." The word kept its learned Greek dress, and that is much of the joke. It lets a writer praise a backside in the vocabulary of classical scholarship, with a statue to point to as the authority.

Synonyms: curvaceous, shapely