Pygmalion

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Pygmalion

Pygmalion . 1 In Greek mythology, king of Cyprus. He fell in love with a beautiful statue of a woman. When he prayed to Aphrodite for a wife like it, the goddess brought the statue to life and Pygmalion married her. In one version of the legend, the statue becomes Aphrodite; another states that Pygmalion sculpted the statue himself and that after coming to life it was called Galatea. 2 In Vergil's Aeneid, king of Tyre. He was the brother of Dido and killed her husband, Sychaeus, to get his riches.

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Pygmalion

The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable | 2006 | | Â© The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable 2006, originally published by Oxford University Press 2006. (Hide copyright information) Copyright

Pygmalion in Greek mythology, a king of Cyprus who fashioned an ivory statue of a beautiful woman and loved it so deeply that in answer to his prayer Aphrodite gave it life. The woman (later named Galatea) bore him a daughter, Paphos.

Pygmalion was used as the name of a play (1916; the musical My Fair Lady was based on it) by George Bernard Shaw, in which the phonetician Henry Higgins teaches the Cockney flower-seller Eliza Doolittle to pass herself off as a society woman. Before her transformation is fully achieved, Eliza utters the words ‘not bloody likely’, which caused a public sensation at the time of the first London production; as a result, Pygmalion became a humorous euphemism for ‘bloody’.

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ELIZABETH KNOWLES. "Pygmalion." The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. Oxford University Press. 2006. Encyclopedia.com. 27 Nov. 2009 <http://www.encyclopedia.com>.

ELIZABETH KNOWLES. "Pygmalion." The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. Oxford University Press. 2006. Encyclopedia.com. (November 27, 2009). http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O214-Pygmalion.html

ELIZABETH KNOWLES. "Pygmalion." The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. Oxford University Press. 2006. Retrieved November 27, 2009 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O214-Pygmalion.html

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