œ
Salts and Soaks
œ
Soaps and Lotions
212 N Main
Onslow, Iowa 52321
319-821-1355
TerryLynsOtheca@yahoo.com
œSo You Wanna Know
œWhat's an Otheca?
It seems, now, to be a screwup.
I was looking up words for "shop" and "store"
in various search engines, dictionaries, and thesaurus-es on the web.
And I hoped to find a term that would mean
"store that sells soaps and lotions" and so on.
Closest thing I kept finding over and over and over was "apothecary".
Problem is,
an "apothecary" is a "pharmacy".
And not only aren't we a "pharmacy", we ain't even a "drug store" neither.
No doubts, no confusions about that.
The wife makes fine unique novelty designer soaps, lotions, salts, soaks, balms, etc.
And while there are definitely things-majik'l about her stuff,
it's doubtful they have any pharmacological properties,
beneficial or otherwise, evidenced by science or not.
And more importantly,
even if there were,
she makes them for the purely sensual pleasures
the way they look, smell, 'taste', feel, and sound,
that's it - no more.
So the use of the word "apothecary" is a no-no.
But more than 15 different sites I went to kept repeating
"apothecary" comes from Greek and Latin roots
meaning "keeper of an otheca, a store".
And a "store" is the word I was looking to replace,
so "otheca" seemed like a nice artistic flare for it.
Since "boutique" points more towards clothing,
"emporium" sounds like way more stuff than she offers,
"mercantile" and "dry goods" seem awfully "Old West"ernish,
and "apothecary" just kept cropping up over and over as a place of,
"toiletries" (which, ain't exactly a very attractive word iff'nya ask me)...
I figured I'd put "Otheca" on the masthead of her webpage and see how she liked it.
She thought is was cute, so it stayed.
Well,
time goes on,
and she's using the name on her product labels,
and more and more people are asking what it means.
So I decides to add a link to one of the many pages that say "otheca, a store".
Only now, the pages in my bookmarks have changed a bit
and they give some varying differences as to the root of "apothecary".
The more I looked, the more confused I got,
so I decided to do some "word smithing" in my search criteria
by breaking "apothecary" down to various syllables
It seems to me, today,
that the word "apothecary" actually stems from a bunch of seperate parts
based on only two actual words
"a" (I still can't find if it's a-po, or ap-o though)
and "theca" (at least so far, there seems to be full agreement that "theca" means "case").
So the word should PROBABLY be Terry Lyn's Theca, rather than Otheca,
especially since she carries some of her soaps en-Case-d in boxes.
But I was told, in no uncertain terms,
"IF YOU THINK I'M GONNA CHANGE ALL THESE LABELS NOW!!!!"
So Otheca it is and Otheca it shall remain.
My fullest a-p-o-log-ies ever-where they are due.
Signed
Webmaster and, unfortunately, wunnuh those "oooooooo - MEN!.....rrrrrrggh" thingeez
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