Belly Button

Have you ever taken umbrage at someone or at something someone said?  An unkind remark perhaps?  Umbrage.  It’s not the most common word in the language, but then it’s not unfamiliar to most of us.  We kind of know what it means.  Offense, resentment.  It comes from the Latin word umbra which means “shadow.”  The phrase “to take umbrage” follows a sort of metaphorical extension from shadow to suspicion and from suspicion to resentment.

If I told you that we have other words from that same Latin word for shadow, you would probably think immediately of umbrella.  An umbrella is really a little shadow–from the Italian ombrella.

Two other words familiar to us all come from combining the Latin sub meaning “under” and umbra: sombrero and somber.  Put on a sombrero and you are under a shadow; put on a sad face, a somber face, and you are emotionally under a shadow. 

And then there is penumbra, the partly lighted area surrounding the complete shadow, that is, umbra, of a body such as the moon during an eclipse.

Now as my index finger glides up the dictionary page, it stops at umbo, a word I’ve never heard of and one unrelated to umbra.  It is defined as “the knob at the center of a shield.”  We don’t use shields much, and that is probably why we don’t know the word.  But a part of our body described by a related word we do all know; in fact, our lives depended on it at one time.  From the same root as umbo comes umbilical.   The umbilical cord, of course, connects the navel of the fetus to the placenta.  We also use umbilical metaphorically to describe an astronaut’s line attaching him to the space capsule or a river that waters a plain.  But the noun umbilicus refers to that knob at the center of our bodies to which our umbilical cord was once attached, our navel.

Of course most of us don’t call it a navel or an umbilicus.  We have a better designation for it.  I can’t think of single body part that is more aptly named than the “belly button.”  I wonder if any other language quite so accurately and alliteratively captures the essence of the funny little swirl at the center of our bodies.  “Belly button.”  It’s not only an accurate visual representation, but it also suggests the silliness of this little blip on our tummies:  If we could just unbutton it we could step out of our skin.  Or if we pushed it, somehow our engines might start up.  I suspect no one knows who invented the phrase “belly button,” but she was most certainly a poet.

Proverbs 3:8 is a familiar text which tells us that the fear of the Lord “shall be health to thy navel, and marrow to thy bones.”  I wonder if any of the modern paraphrasers of scripture have rendered naval as “belly button.”  I hope so.