Logophily

I like language.  Who doesn’t (1)?  We’re all here because of language, in the metaphorical sense, of course, but in this case I mean us, here, at our devices, reading these words.

So I’d like to talk a bit about etymology, now and (inshallah) in similar future pieces.  It seems important to me, but maybe only really inasmuch as I find it interesting.

Etymology is word-history.  The etymology of etymology is helpful in telling what etymology is and what etymology isn’t.

Etymology means “the study of truth about a word,” more or less.  The word was coined (2) (as they say) in antiquity (as they say).  The original classical idea was that digging or more likely imagining far back enough would reveal truth, the truth, about a word, and would thus reveal how we’ve corrupted that original truth.

Finding out a word’s history doesn’t reveal those sorts of deep immutable truths, of course.  Language is sloppy and imprecise and impure.  Obsessive language pedants, like obsessive dog breeders, are always rattling on about purity, which is a gross (3) thing.  I mean, on the one hand, it would kind of be a shame to lose the current gene-set of, say, the Irish wolfhound (I can’t being myself to feel the same way about the bichon frise, but that’s my own perceptual problem, and it doesn’t really have anything to do with the subject at hand).  On the other hand, the Irish wolfhound (and the bichon frise) came about because of very careful mixing.  And/or careless mixing.  I don’t know.  I’m not big on dog breeding.  Dogs have a hell of a lot of chromosomes, which makes them really variable and mutable, which leads to a world where there are both whippets and Saint Bernards (4).

Language changes.  Assholes who bitch about new usages are doing so by means of words and constructions that the same assholes of two generations ago bitched about.  Stop telling people what not to write, assholes (5).  More to the point, a word never fully loses a sense, anymore.  We’ve always got recourse to those historical senses I mentioned.  To extend my stupid dog-metaphor even further, we’ve got a linguistic world where we can have the prototypical ancestors of and the miscegenate descendants of the wolfhound, both right alongside the beast that we currently know.  Grousing that people won’t know the same wolfhound, and that a wolfhound is thus rendered meaningless, strikes me as silly.  We don’t all know the same wolfhound even when we know the same wolfhound.  Or dog shows would be pointless.  This metaphor is really getting dumb.

So the etymon in etymology isn’t really a truth (the Oxford English Dictionary uses scare quotes for each instance of truth in the definitions of etymology and the like.)  But it does give a sense of the history of a word, what came beforehand, when the word first came into existence, and how people have used the word initially and over time, all of which is valuable.

All of that information is valuable in that it gives us (or can give us) a new frame of reference for a word.  Etymology now means “the history of a word.”  Thinking about etymology as truth-study (which isn’t what it means anymore) gives me a new way of thinking about etymology.  It’s even more interesting when it’s not quite so tautologically recursive.

Footnotes:

(1)  Lots of people.  Vast swathes of the world do not in any appreciable way like language.

(2)  The etymon-definition disagreement there is underscored by the fact that it seems utterly unimportant that we use a money-word to discuss how people make words.  It’s a metaphor, but it’s a dead one.  Make up a word and you’ll see.  It’s much like making your own currency.

(3)  Gross-yucky and gross-broad.  It’s weird that the sense of gross has become less gross as it has become more grody.

(4)  Equally thorough research has gone into some of the language talk, so caveat lector.

(5)  Someone’s not going to get this joke, even with the footnote.