Ol’ Blue Eye

Singular. The other one is amber. And the cat in question is not Sinatra but a Turkish one, from the shores of Lake Van, where the local toms are famous for two things: swimming, and looking at you with two different eyes at once.

Last time we established that the children of Lake Van come out of the water blond. Since the cats go in after them, the temptation to credit the water with their snowy coats as well is considerable. It should be resisted. The whiteness of the Van cat owes nothing to soda: it is congenital, the work of the dominant white gene, which switches off the coat’s pigment wholesale and frequently takes the eyes with it. Where it does, the eye is blue for the plain reason that there is no pigment in the iris to be any other colour, and deafness often follows on the same side—the inner ear having been left without the same cells. Not always, and not in every white cat; but often enough that Van breeders can tell you which side of the room to approach a kitten from.

A note for the pedantic, since the confusion is now thoroughly institutionalised: the cat of the lake, the Van kedisi, is the all-white animal with the odd eyes. The pedigree breed registered in the West as the Turkish Van is a different proposition altogether—white with coloured head and tail, its pattern produced by an entirely different gene, and its ancestors exported in the 1950s by two English ladies who happened to be driving through. The Turks are still faintly annoyed about it.

The odd eyes have a Greek name, heterochromia, and no particular loyalty to Van—white cats of every provenance produce it, Angoras included—but at Van it is common enough to have become the local trademark. One eye blue, one eye amber.

The straw-thief

Amber, in Turkish, is kehribar, and behind it stands the Persian kāh-rubā, “straw-thief.” The Persians had noticed what is now demonstrated to bored fourteen-year-olds with a plastic ruler: rub a piece of amber and it starts stealing straw, dust, and anything else insufficiently attached to the table.

The Greeks called the same stone ἤλεκτρον, and the schoolbooks connect it with ἠλέκτωρ, the beaming sun. The connection is real enough as a family resemblance, but it should be said that both words are of unknown origin—Frisk gives it up, Beekes suspects something Pre-Greek—so “the Greeks named it for its shine” is a tidy story resting on an untidy foundation. What can be said without hedging is that the Persian named the stone for what it does and the Greek did not, and that physics subsequently proved the Persian right and adopted the Greek anyway.

The English, meanwhile, managed something rather worse. Amber arrived from Arabic ʿanbar—which meant ambergris, the waxy substance produced in the gut of the sperm whale and prized by perfumers. The two things were both found washed up on beaches, both were expensive, and medieval Europe filed them together. For a while the languages distinguished them politely as yellow amber and grey amber; then ambergris went out of fashion, the qualifier fell away, and the fossil resin was left wearing the whale’s name. The Persians described electrostatics; the English described a beachcombing error.

Modern Greek, for its part, has quietly given the whole thing up and calls amber κεχριμπάρι—which is the Persian straw-thief, come back round the long way through Turkish.

From ornament to particle

Ēlektron spent two thousand years as a word for jewellery, with a sideline in metallurgy: the Greeks used it for the pale gold-and-silver alloy as well, which is why the Lydians struck the first coins in something a lexicographer would call amber. Then in 1600 William Gilbert—physician, shortly to be Elizabeth I’s own, and no relation whatever to the Gilbert who two centuries later would hand potassium its Arabic name—published De Magnete, distinguished the pull of the lodestone from the pull of the rubbed stone, and gave the second the Latin adjective electricus: amber-ish. Thomas Browne turned the adjective into electricity in 1646. George Johnstone Stoney, in 1891, needed a name for the indivisible unit of charge and reached for the same stone again.

So the smallest thing anyone had counted was named after a lump of tree resin, which was named after either the sun or nothing in particular, which the Persians had more sensibly named after its habit of picking up straw. Which is, when you think about it, precisely what an electron does.

The upshot is a cat with one eye the colour of the lake it swims in and the other the colour of the beaming sun—which, given what the lake and the sun between them do to the hair of the local schoolboys, is about as neat as symbolism gets. Sinatra only managed the one. The cats of Van are unlikely to have given the matter much thought: they have decided views on food and on being stroked, and none whatever on Indo-European.