I came across the word nemesia in a crossword earlier -- it's a flower -- and was interested to see if it had anything to do with Nemesis, the ancient Greek goddess of retribution.
The ancient Greek translation of nemesia was 'catchfly', so presumably this was the retribution meted out to insects by the flower.
The goddess' name Nemesis came from an ordinary Greek word meaning 'righteous indignation' or 'retribution', and from a related verb meaning 'to give what is due, deal, distribute' (OED). It's always fascinating to follow hyperlinks and cross-references in a dictionary, and at the Nemesis entry in the OED is a hyperlink to one of the earliest words in English, the verb nim, meaning 'take' or 'steal', which probably comes from the ancient Greek, according to the OED.
Nim is a cognate of the German verb nehmen to take. In Old English the verb nim was a strong verb with the singular and plural forms of the past tense nam and nōmon and an inflected past participle genumen (note that the 3 main forms of the modern German verb are nehmen, nahm, genommen). Nim remained in common use until the 15th century, and then dropped out of use, only to reappear a hundred years or so later (but as a weak, not strong, verb) with the colloquial meaning 'steal'. It was gradually superseded by the verb take, which has an Old Norse origin.
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