This is the allusionist in which I, Helen Zoltzman, feed the linguistic ducts.

It's June, the President of the United States has officially designated it LGBT Pride Month,

and there'll be Pride events around the world.

So in today's show, we'll discover how the word Pride came to be the banner word

for demonstrations and celebrations of LGBT rights and culture.

To warm up, here's some word history.

One of the reasons I like words so much is that they are full of surprises.

For instance, I thought it was pretty well known that the term lesbian

alludes to the Greek island of Lesbos, home to the poet Safo,

who was famous for her poems about love between women.

Lesbim was first used to describe same-sex relationships in the late 19th century,

but what I didn't know is that prior to then it had quite a different life.

From around the year 1590, a lesbian rule was the name of a tool used by stonemasins,

a stick made of a kind of lead found on the Isle of Lesbos,

that was flexible so that it could be used to measure or be moulded to irregular shapes.

And you can follow the lesbian rule back to the 4th century BC,

when the Greek philosopher Aristotle used it as a simile for how the legal system had to be flexible

and respond to the particulars of each case.

He wrote,

When the thing is indefinite, the rule also is indefinite,

like the lead and rule used in making the lesbian moulding,

the rule adapts itself to the shape of the stone and is not rigid,

...