  Any residual sympathy for Hermogenes’ original conviction that man and horse could just as easily have been assigned each other’s names is, it seems, meant to have evaporated by this point. (Even at 433e–434a, very near the end of the dialogue Socrates will continue to reject Hermogenes’ assertion of name-interchangeability, this time with the examples of ‘large’ and ‘small’.) Scholars who doubt that Plato means to make such generous concessions to naturalism have been inclined to treat etymologies like that of ‘man’ as non-serious. But this particular decoding was widely accepted by later writers, not all of them Platonists, and there is no evidence that anyone, Plato included, thought it ridiculous. The latter is equally true regarding the remainder of the etymologies.