Ancient myths and legends from many cultures include creatures like the Greek minotaur, which was a man’s body with a bull’s head. There were various Egyptian gods that were similar amalgams; Anubis had the head of a jackal and Bast had a cat’s head. Satyrs are part human and part goat, and so on.
All of these beings are “therianthropes.” The word comes from two Greek words: “therion” (wild animal) and “anthropos” (human being). It’s not an original Greek word, though; it was coined around 1885. By now the word is getting long in the tooth — which could, of course, apply to a therianthrope who happened to have a horse’s head; “long in the tooth” originally referred to horses, on the basis of the belief (I have no idea how true this is) that the older a horse is, the longer its teeth appear.
There are doubtless many other effects that can accrue from walking around with a person’s body and an animal’s noggin. Although “noggin” usually refers to a human head, that’s probably because of the relative scarcity of therianthropic examples in everyday life. “Noggin” was originally a small cup — that’s back in the late 1500s when the word appeared. A century or so later “noggin” had acquired the meaning of what might be in the small cup: a small drink of alcohol. That development was probably related to “nog,” which at the time meant a type of strong ale, and eventually came to mean any alcoholic drink. That’s where “eggnog” comes from. By the mid 1700s people had probably begun to notice (finally?) that drinking enough alcohol makes your head feel funny, and “noggin” started to be used for “head” about that time.
Therianthropes are also apt to have unusual mugs, too. That is, “mug” can mean “face. That evolution happened during the same period as the changes in “noggin;” “mug” meant, as it still does, a heavy cup in the 1500s. Then in the 1700s it was quite the fad to decorate mugs with human faces (or at least caricatures of faces). Around the same time (and I’m not saying this is connected, but it might be), “mug” came to also mean face. The verb form “to mug” or “get mugged” originally referred to hitting someone in the face.
Combine a face, a mug, and some eggnog, and you might very well need a napkin, especially if your noggin is spinning from the previous couple of eggnogs. Although you might be feeling a bit sleepy at that point, the “nap” in “napkin” has nothing to do with sleeping. That word “nap” comes from the Old English “hnappian,” which meant to doze. The “nap” in napkin comes from the Latin word “mappa” (cloth). When “mappa” entered Old French, somebody misheard something (possibly more eggnog was involved) and the “m” was changed to “n.” For some reason another word derived from “mappa” kept the “m:” “map.” In any case, the word that arrived in English was “nape,” which is now obsolete (it’s not the one meaning the back of your neck), but meant “cloth”. “Nape” is also behind “apron,” which was originally “napron.” “A napron” became “an apron” — this also happened when “a nadder” became “an adder” and “a noumpere” became “an umpire.”
The “kin” in napkin might come from being a diminutive meaning “small,” as in “pumpkin” (the modern version of pumpkins have been bred to be a great deal larger than they used to be). “Bodkin” is another example; it can mean a small body (as in a favorite oath in the 1500s and 1600s: “odds bodkins.” (“Bodkin” can also mean something sharp, like a dagger.) Oddly enough therianthropes hardly ever seem to have bodkins — even when their noggins are from smaller sorts of animals, their mugs are sized to fit a human body (in some cases a particularly large human body) rather than the other way around. But if you’re ever mugged by a therianthrope who bops you on the noggin, just hope he’s not also carrying the other kind of bodkin.
