Middle

English is often called a "mixed" or even a "mongrel" language; the words come from a true hybrid of Saxon, Celtic, Latin, French, Norse and Greek.  

My recent reading turned out to be an intricate mix of Greek heritage or mythology. That's a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel with the mysterious title Middlesex.

The truly classic style of writing, paradoxical as it may seem, is the narrator voice of Cal telling the story of grandparents since 1922, all the way to Cal's birth in 1960. Back then, fetal sonogram was unheard of, and the next best thing to predict Cal's sex was a silver spoon dangling over the belly of Cal's mother. In what they claimed to be science, the silver spoon tied to a string twirled over the mother's belly, moving round and round in an Ouija-board way, until the path flattened to a direction that foretold Cal is a boy. "Koros!" The room erupted with shouts of "Koros, koros." 

The baby guessing appeared to be wrong by the time Cal was born. As far as the parents and doctors could tell, Cal was feminine. What they didn't realise was a tricky enzyme deficiency hitchhiking the journey of one paired chromosome numbered five. Cal's body doesn't produce dihydrotestosterone hormone. That means Cal followed a primarily female line of development despite the sex chromosome telling otherwise.  Cal was brought up around dolls, hair clips, full set of Madeline books, party dresses, the Easy-Bake Oven, the hula hoop.

That is how Cal was born twice: first a a baby girl with birth certificate name of Calliope Helen Stephanies; and then again, as a teenage boy, after which his driver's license recorded the first name as Cal.