Viagra, n. The first syllable of the brand name of this well-known drug, which hit the market in 1998, is from virile. But the later elements are not, as has been guessed by some, taken from Niagara. It is most likely simply an arbitrary formulation.
This wiki has a song to sing, O!
Sing me your song, O!
It is sung to the moon
By a love-lorn loon,
Who fled from the mocking throng, O!
It’s a song of Viagra and it makes the claim
That the fons et origo of the very same
Was a waterfall and tiger with a Sanskrit name
And ‘twas all for the love of a lady.
May we happily join the pursuing throng or is there anything at all to this?
Viagra, which was suggested by Interbrand Wood (the consultancy firm hired by Pfizer), is itself a multisourced neologism, based on Sanskrit व्याघ्र vyāghráh “tiger” but enhanced by the words vigour (i.e. strength) and Niagara (i.e. free/forceful flow)
The above is sourced to this book - Zuckermann, Ghil’ad (2003). Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 59., Zuckermann, according to his wiki, is a Professor of Linguistics and Endangered Languages at the University of Adelaide. This may or may not add weight to the claim. I confess that coming across phrases like a socio-philological framework for the analysis of camouflaged borrowing such as phono-semantic matching, and introducing a classification for “multisourced neologization” had me scurrying for the exit.
