Telling stories, book and film

La satire and English « satire » are the same word, and both have been pulled for centuries towards an animal they have no connection with. The Latin is satura, and behind it stands the adjective satur, full, sated, which is also the ancestor of « saturate ». A lanx satura was a full dish, a platter of mixed things; from the dish the name passed to a kind of writing that mixes everything — verse, abuse, a little moralising — which is what the Roman satirists actually wrote. The Greek satyros, the goat-legged companion of Dionysus, is a separate word from a separate language, and the two were confused so thoroughly in the Middle Ages that the genre was spelled « satyre » in English for a long time. English now keeps the pair apart by sound. French cannot, because la satire and le satyre are homophones, and only the article and the spelling separate them. Hence one warning before using the second: in everyday French un satyre is not a woodland creature at all, but a man who molests women.