Itis

• Itys, son of Procne and Tereus, king of Thrace [Ovid, Meta. VI, 652 ("Ityn

huc accersite!")]. Procne killed her son Itys in order to cook and feed him to Tereus after she had discovered that he had raped Philomela, her sister, and cut out her tongue so that she could not tell what he had done. Procne and Philomela afterward escaped the vengance of Tereus by turning respectively into a swallow and a rdghtingale. Philomela, the nightingale, is said to cry out the name Itys, whose death she had caused: "Itu! Itu!" [Ovid, Meta. VI, 426-674; cf. 78/477; 82/525].

• • The history is also told, in some way or another, by Swinburne, Coleridge, T. S. Eliot and Pound (this one, in his Canto IV, fusions the Greek story with a similar Provençal legend involving Guillems de Cabestanh)

• -itis noun suffix denoting diseases characterized by inflammation, Modern Latin, from Gk. -itis, feminine of adj. suffix -ites "pertaining to." Feminine because it was used with feminine noun nosos "disease," especially in Gk. arthritis (nosos) "(disease) of the joints," which was one of the earliest borrowings into English and from which the suffix was abstracted in other uses.

• itis is the common name of the post-prandial somnolence: a normal state of drowsiness or lassitude following a meal. Post-prandial somnolence has two components – a general state of low energy related to activation of the parasympathetic nervous system in response to mass in the gastrointestinal tract, and a specific state of sleepiness caused by hormonal and neurochemical changes related to the rate at which glucose enters the bloodstream and its downstream effects on amino acid transport in the central nervous system.

• • (Still, I don't know if the term was coined before or after FW was written, so further clarification will be appreciated)