Undecipherable

A scientist of words

I know nothing of the McCann case beyond what I have seen in the media and can express no opinion about it; this video fascinates me not so much in relation to the subject as to the insight it gives into our unconscious use of language, a theme I have harped upon several times before. Well worth the two hours fifteen minutes it takes to view.

Whither Hither and Thither?

These three words, for a long time merely literary, have gone out of fashion altogether except in compound use (“hitherto”, “hither and thither”) or when the writer or speaker wishes to introduce a whimsical note (“whither Obama now?”). It is a shame, because their loss also deprives us of shades of meaning.

The modern replacement for “hither” is simply “here”, doing away with the sense of movement. Consider these quotations from the dictionary: “Come hither unto me” (1550, and by the way “come hither” is still, just about, used adjectivally to describe a coy, arch, or seductive look bestowed by a woman); “hyther tendeth al prudence and pollycy” (1538). I believe that “hither” is the intensive form of “here”. The command “bring him hither!” implies “from that place to this” more imperiously than “bring him here!”

Likewise, “thither” intensifies “there” and “whither” intensifies “where”.

“Here”, “there” and “where” are ancient words, as one might expect of such important tokens of meaning. “Here” and “there” are closely related: the latter probably grew out of the former, a pleasing idea since we always start from “here”, unless of course we are Irish and giving directional advice (“I wouldn’t be starting from here”). “Where”, however, comes to us through the interrogative Anglo Saxon form “hwár?”, which is a relative of “hwā?”, “who?”

“When”, “what”, “where”, “who”, “why”, “which” and “how” all begin with aspirants. This somehow suggests, to me at any rate, the state of ignorance. When we are puzzled or confounded by something we often exhale through partially pursed lips. Might the initial aspirant have arisen, in the very deepest past, from association with this? After all, words have to begin somewhere. If they are onomatopoeic (e.g. “crow”, “crash”, “whip”) their etymology is easy to explain, but the expression of abstract ideas is so subtle that there must originally have been some common ground, however tenuous.

One of our vital abilities is to take things for granted. Without it we would never get anything done. Yet sometimes it is instructive to stop and consider an aspect – any aspect – of life to which we have never before given much thought. These three words, passing from use, remind us of the mutability and great age of our language, that gigantic construction built from nothing but a need to understand the other fellow and in turn tell him what we think. English is more than a means of communication: it is a teeming city, continually being redeveloped, partially demolished, rebuilt, the product of millions of minds and sensibilities.

Below the ground, slowly becoming buried by new layers of construction, the archaeology is there for anyone who cares to dig.

Building the mosaic

The human retina has two sorts of photoreceptors. Rods (so called for their shape) respond only to dim, monochromatic light, while cones are adapted to the perception of colour and detail. The middle of the retina is formed into a small pit, the fovea. Here the cones are densest; and in the middle of the fovea is an area about a third of a millimetre in diameter, called the foveola, where the concentration of cones is greatest of all.

Rather than perceiving something in detail all at once, we scan it. The musculature of the eyes makes a series of tiny jerks, termed saccades, shifting the foveola from one point to another. In this way the brain builds up a mosaic which the imagination and memory try to make sense of.

Hearing operates in an analogous manner, using a granular series of pressure waves. In fact the whole of our perception works like this.

What we do with the mosaic depends on who we are. Our genetics, prejudices and past experiences are all brought to bear when integrating and interpreting information.

Yesterday I walked the path fringing the harbour. The tidal surge that recently wreaked havoc on this coast has left behind huge quantities of brash – the brown and decaying remnants of marsh plants, mixed here and there with branches of seablite or gorse, driftwood, plastic debris, gates, fencing, boats large and small, even an errant, crazily-angled footbridge. The path is still muddy, but under a mild south-westerly breeze and an even milder February sun it was beginning to dry out. Spring is returning to this hemisphere. The birds know it; but the season is still winter.

The sky was azure, the clouds white, the sea ultramarine. Far away across the estuary, on the sands at the end of the shingle spit, many seals were basking. The profile of the bottom there forms a trap for fish. Those mobile specks, too distant to identify, were fish-eating birds: mergansers, goldeneyes, Slavonian grebes, red-throated divers, perhaps black-throated and great northern divers as well (all were reported later). The scene was alive with birds, a thousand or more brent geese, innumerable gulls, cormorants, swirling clouds of waders – knot and dunlin, mainly, no doubt. For me, with my history and interests, an arc of excitement was building.

At length the path brought me to the fen, a wide, quiet, reed-fringed lagoon behind the sea wall, with inlets and spits where birds can hide, rest and preen. On my preceding visit a single avocet, an early harbinger of spring, had been swimming there and upending like a duck. Now there were forty. The lapwing flock had dwindled; the golden plover had gone altogether, and in their place were black-tailed godwits.

Because I had left my telescope at home, I spent a long time scrutinizing the fen with binoculars only. It is surprising how much information the foveolas can glean, even at low magnification. I sorted through the geese on the far side, admired the pintails (surely there is no more elegant creature than a drake pintail), examined the many black-headed gulls for something rare, counted the godwits and avocets, jotted notes. Just when I thought I had covered everything I picked up a single drake pochard, feeding where the water is deepest.

Descending the wooden steps, I gained the footpath that skirts the western side: I had decided to walk even further, to check the freshwater meres near the coast road. The footpath is thickly lined with scrub and small trees, but here and there affords views of the fen.

My afternoon was assembling grain by grain, like the pixels on this computer screen or the frames of a cinema film, like the words of a story or even the letters of a sentence. I was content, more than content, with my reward for the long walk. This landscape has always suited me very well, and if the day had offered nothing more I should have gone home happy.

I stopped once more to raise my binoculars to the fen. They were filled with leafless willows, a tawny wall of dead reeds, gunmetal water, all sunlit from the right, the colours perfect. Then, low above the reeds, I saw the thuggish bulk of a female sparrowhawk coming slantwise in my direction. Her brown plumage co-ordinated exactly with the waxen twigs and branches of the willows. In an instant she was lost to view behind the foreground hawthorns.

A bird of prey is a solitary assassin, living fast, much of its time yielded to the imperative to feed. An evolutionary arms race joins predator and prey: most attacks end in failure. As the winter afternoon wanes a hungry hawk can become desperate and even reckless.

Sparrowhawks hunt in various ways. A common ploy is to cruise the length of a hedge and flip over it to surprise whatever is on the other side – a blackbird or even a wood pigeon, for a really strong female hawk. This one was using the reedbed like that.

For an odd, floating moment I was the only one who knew she had arrived. Then most of the birds on the fen took flight, many more lapwings than I had been able to count, avocets, gulls, even some of the teal and wigeon; the rasping cries of a fleeing snipe came from high above the willows.

I could not tell whether the hawk had struck, and didn’t see her again, but my glimpse of her had unified what had gone before. It was the final piece of mosaic. The naturalist longs to blend with nature, to learn its secrets, a hopeless quest but one that always draws him on. Just for those two or three seconds before the fen erupted, I was as much hawk as human.

It bears saying that each of has unique experiences, all the time. Each of us is building a unique vision of the world. If I had no interest in birds, or had simply been looking the other way, my afternoon would have felt quite different. And your past few minutes would have felt different too, because you would not have been reading this, but assembling some other mosaic, in keeping with the larger mosaic that conforms to the unique combination made by your genetics, history, and system of beliefs.

Ratio and Oratio

According to Skeat, the Anglo-Saxon word word is derived from the Indo-Germanic root wer, “to speak”. It is cognate with the Dutch woord, the Icelandic orð, the Danish and Swedish ord, the German wort and the Meso-Gothic waurd. He compares it with the Lithuanian wardas, “a name” and the Latin verbum, “a word” – literally “a thing spoken”.

All these forms retain the original ur sound, which seems fitting, because “ur” is one of the most basic productions of the human voice. It is nice to think that “ur”, with its intensifying “w”, was one of the earliest terms agreed upon by those who named the animals.

Compare our word with the Greek λόγος (logos), which is defined in Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon as “(A) the word or outward form by which the inward thought is made known;” and, giving us a glimpse of the Hellenic mind, “(B) the inward thought or reason itself; so that λόγος comprehends both the Latin ratio and oratio.”

Among the definitions of ratio in Cassell’s Latin Dictionary is “the faculty of mind which calculates and plans, the reason”; the primary meaning is “a reckoning, an account, computation, calculation”. Oratio simply means “speaking, speech, language”, and we may infer that it proceeds both in concept and etymologically from ratio.

To the Greeks reason and speech were inseparable, which helps to illuminate the glories of their language and civilization. However, to the northern βαρβαροι (barbarians), who were probably so called because of their unintelligible utterances (“baa-baa-baa”), the ur came first.

Speech and reason are like the chicken and egg. In the evolution of the human brain each gave rise to the other. The more precise and logical (those Greeks again!) one’s mental language, the more precise and logical, the more reasoned will be one’s conduct. That is why precision in language matters. At our peril we fail to teach our children syntax and spelling; relativists fail to expose them to the glories of our own language, and with every failure of teaching a little of our civilization dies.

That’s quite enough polemic (πόλεμος, a battle). This post is about the word that underlies our classification of the world: without agreeing among us what a word means, there can be no communication, and before doing that we need a word for “word”.

     “There’s glory for you!”
     “I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory’,” Alice said.
     Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t – till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’”
     “But ‘glory’ doesn't mean ‘a nice knock-down argument’,” Alice objected.
     “When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”
     “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
     “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all.”

In its original Greek, St John’s gospel begins:

Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ Λόγος, καὶ ὁ Λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν Θεόν, καὶ Θεός ἦν ὁ Λόγος.

In the Vulgate:

In principio erat Verbum et Verbum erat apud Deum et Deus erat Verbum.

In the King James translation:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

In the Chalcedonian creed, Christ is the very Λόγος itself, the essence of reason. Without wishing to offend, I would point out that this is an early, and very powerful, attempt to hijack language for religious or political ends. The technique has been used more recently and to great effect by disciples of the Frankfurt School. By making some words taboo, they try to make the thought taboo as well. This exchange between ratio and oratio was perfectly understood by George Orwell; his Newspeak (in Nineteen Eighty-four) predicts the rise of political correctness.

To resist the hijackers we first have know where a word comes from. Etymology is the study of the origins of words and how one word begets or influences another. For a writer it is both fascinating and fundamental. One of my favourite books (acquired second-hand and inscribed: “Margaret with bestest love from R. Xmastide : 1915”) is A Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language by Walter Skeat. It is a treasure-trove of revelation and connection. We see the way words can subtly but innocently change their meaning over the years: the principle of Chinese Whispers is at work every time we communicate with our fellows.

Though our language is imprecise, it is the best we have. The more exact we can be with it the more clearly we will understand one another and the better we will get along. This is an old argument, but it bears repeating every day. It is too easy to become a Humpty Dumpty; etymology is one antidote, and to begin this occasional series of etymological reflections I thought it proper to start with the Word itself.