OYSTERS AND OSTRICHES

Oysters have been around a long time. Longer than ostriches.
For the ancient Greeks, an oyster was an OSTREON. The general word for shellfish was OSTRAKINOS, which then became the word for an earthenware pot or dish, an OSTRAKON. When the Athenians ostracized someone, they voted him out of the city, writing his name on fragments of earthenware pots which they used as ballots.
The OST- root also appears in the Greek word for bone, OSTEON, which is also the word for a rock, or the stone of a fruit. The ancient Sanskrit word behind OSTEON is ASTHI, or ASTHNAS: bone. For the Greeks, OSTEINOS says made of bone; an OSTARION is a little bone. And OSXE is the word for scrotum.
The OST- or OS- root for bone and rock and the stone of a fruit, an earthenware pot or dish, a shellfish and specifically an oyster, is a root meaning something hard. OSXE, the Greek for scrotum, is perhaps derived from the same root, but if so only secondarily: OSXE is more likely related to the SCRO- root that is used in the Latin word SCROTUM, the pouch or sack for the testicles.
According to eytmologists, an ostrich also gets its name from ancient Greek. For the Romans, AVISTRUTHIO or simply STRUTHIO was a large grey bird, which took its name from the Greek STROUTHION, and the earlier STROUTHOS. Actually, the ostrich was a MEGASTROUTHOS for the Greeks; the STROUTHOS was a sparrow. And a MEGASTROUTHOS was also called a STROUTHIOCAMELOS.
But a case—erroneous, but a case nonetheless—can be made, etymologically, for ostriches being related to oysters, not sparrows. Ostriches are large grey birds, whose bodies are shaped much like giant oysters—giant oysters with long necks and long, skinny legs. The ostrich might just as well get its name from an oyster as from a sparrow. Visually, ostriches are much more like giant oysters than giant sparrows, in shape and color. And if the Greek OSXE does derive from the OS root, making scrota related to oysters, the Greeks could just as easily have seen ostriches as related to oysters.

A Special Report from the
Speculative Etymology Section of the
Center for the Advancement of Peripheral Thought