almost nine feet tall and a woman about ten feet tall lived near his home. He also reports that Ters, a deity who seems to have been an equivalent of Priapus, was invoked by Antwerpian women when they were taken by surprise or sudden fear, and that there was a house in Antwerp adjoining the prison of Het Steen that bore a statue which had been furnished with a large worn away phallus. Legacy Christoffel Plantijn had been a friend of Goropius's and the Antwerp-based printing house known as the Plantin Press, which first published Goropius's works in 1569, printed the linguist-physician’s posthumous collected work in 1580 as a massive volume of more than a thousand pages. Goropius's work was met with a mixture of ridicule and admiration. Goropius is considered to have given Dutch linguistics, and Gothic philology in general, a bad name. Though Goropius had admirers (among them Abraham Ortelius and Richard Hakluyt), his etymologies have been considered "linguistic chauvinism," and Leibniz coined the term goropism, meaning absurd etymological theories. Justus Lipsius and Hugo Grotius discounted Goropius's linguistic theories. "Never have I read greater nonsense," the scholar Joseph Scaliger wrote of Goropius's etymologies. See also Indo-European languages Sources How come we can't decipher the Indus script? (Straight Dope article containing reference to Goropius) Droixhe, D., La linguistique et l'appel de l'histoire. Rationalisme et révolutions positivistes, Genève, Droz, 1987. Droixhe, D., Souvenirs de Babel. La reconstruction de l’histoire des langues de la Renaissance aux Lumières, Bruxelles, ARLLFB, 2007. Naborn, R. A., Etymologies in Joannes Goropius Becanus''' Hermathena. Master's Thesis, University of Kansas, 1989. Naborn, R. A., 'Becanus' Etymological Methods', in: Voortgang'' 15:79-86 . Van Hal, T., “Moedertalen en taalmoeders”. Het vroegmoderne taalvergelijkende onderzoek in de Lage Landen, Brussels, 2010, 77-140. References 1519 births 1572 deaths Physicians of the Habsburg Netherlands Linguists from the Netherlands Dutch Renaissance humanists People from Hilvarenbeek 16th-century linguists Old University of Leuven alumni