"Down the shore."

As in: "Next week I will be down the shore, visiting my folks." What a great Jerseyism.

Homer has something close. In Book One of the Iliad, the priest Chryses, having been ill-received by Agamemnon, goes away pretty steamed towards the beaches of Troy to call in the ancient equivalent of an air strike on the insolent Greeks, courtesy of his divine patron Apollo. The Greek here is quite lovely - âç ä' áêåùí ðáñá èéíá ðïëõöëïéóâïéï èáëáóóçò - "and he went, silent, down to the shore of the much-roaring sea" (my translation).

I've seen other translations of this, and it seems most people want to turn ðáñá èéíá into "by the sea", forgetting that while ðáñá can mean "by" or "beside", when used with verbs of motion (here âç), it almost always has a sense of that motion attached to it as well. Furthermore, the accusative case itself connotes motion towards a goal. If Homer had wanted to paint a picture of Chryses walking along the shore, he could just as well have used the dative case, which is motion-neutral, as the object of the preposition ðáñá, and not the accusative, without even disrupting the meter of the line as it stands. No, I'm thinking Homer had an idea of Chryses storming away from the Greek generals' headquarters and towards the water's edge.

Now the "down" part is all me, but it's not unwarranted if you know a thing or two about the ways the Greeks oriented themselves spatially. In Greek literature, away from the beach is always "up" and towards the water is always "down", even if you're not necessarily talking about the island of Santorini and what seems like ten thousand steps from the boat to the center of town. This sense has carried through into English, as my Jersey expression "down the shore" demonstrates. For those of you who haven't been to South Jersey, let me assure you that there is no topography there whatsoever, unless you're counting landfills. Since all of SoJo is pretty much at sea level, "down" and "up" don't make much sense, but they're the preferred directions when talking about your summer vacation plans.

So even though Homer isn't actually saying "down (to) the shore", I think he's meaning it, in the looser sense that a modern Greek or even Jerseyan would understand. If Chryses were clambering down a cliff to the water's edge, Homer would probably have used another preposition such as êáôá, but the "down"-ness of going to the beach is implicit here, I think, so I'm going to stand by my somewhat free translation. Besides, it has a nice ring to it.

All this from thinking about going to Jersey for the 4th of July!