Tom Hillman has a nice essay about lameness and what it means in the Silmarillion, with particular attention to Melkor and the story of Turin. The piece begins, though, with Hephaestus’s lameness, and a quote from the Iliad.
From that snippet, I learn that the words Homer uses for “unquenchable laughter” are “ἄσβεστος … γέλως”, or in Roman letters, “asbestos gelos”. “Asbestos”, it turns out, is the Greek word for “unquenchable”.
This reminds me that in The Lord of the Rings, exactly one character is called “unquenchable”. If Pippin is the only hobbit who’s truly “ἄσβεστος”, shouldn’t he have been the one to take the Ring to the Fires of Doom?
Tom Hillman
a most unquenchable punster, sir. thanks for the laugh.