Compound Noun To Use Today: solar plexus.

You only ever hear of the solar plexus when it's in trouble: usually, someone punches the hero in the solar plexus and he doubles up in agony, fighting for breath.

Luckily he recovers in a couple of instants, and goes on to win the day. Hurray!

The solar plexus is to be found, these stories tell us, at the front of the body at the base of the ribs - but in that case what's solar about it (I've heard of a couple of sun-shining parts of the anatomy, but that's never included the stomach)? And, for that matter, what's a plexus?

The solar plexus (it's often called by the doctors the celiac plexus, but that's just to confuse everyone) is genuinely a plexus, which is a complicated network or arrangement, usually of blood vessels or nerves. (It's nerves in the case of the solar plexus.)

Now, as you will have noticed, this mass of nerves is tucked inside the body, but a blow to the general area it inhabits can shock the solar plexus into a state of great bewilderment, and this can affect pretty much all your (to use another technical term) innards.

That's the plexus part of the compound noun.

And what's so sunny about it?

This:

Compound Noun To Use Today: solar plexus. The Latin word plectere, which gives us plexus, means to plait. The word solar comes from the other Latin word sōl, which means sun, and refers to all the branching nerves which come out of the plexus like the rays of the sun...

...don't.

But we know what they mean, all the same.


Illustration by Øyvind Holmstad