Discussions of "Ascian"

The last two editions on the World Wide Words mailing list (http://www.quinion.com/words/) have included discussions of the word "Ascian". (http://www.quinion.com/words/qa/qa-asc1.htm.) No reference to Gene Wolfe's works, but I chastised them for that. -Ouroboros

I went there and the discussion prompted me to look for a similar word in a Portuguese dictionary (since Portuguese is a Latin-derived language, it seemed a good try). So, here it is: in Portuguese there's the word "áscio", meaning "He who lives in the torrid zone, where, at noon, the there's no shadows produced by the Sun". The given root is the Latin word "ascios".