Goodbye

As we prepare for the beginning of a new era in America, the origin of the words “goodbye, farewell, adios, adieu, and the ever popular ‘see you later’” come to mind. (I am including the Spanish “adios” and the French “adieu” because both are easily understood and occasionally used in American English.)

“Goodbye” is a seriously mangled and corrupted pronunciation of “God be with you.” This wish that the person from whom one is parting should be committed to the care of God is a nice thought, actually. By the sixteenth century it had been worn down by constant usage to “God be wi’ you” or perhaps “God be wi’ ye.” By the 18th century it had further eroded to “God b’ye” and other versions. By the 19th century it had stabilized to “Good-bye,” and it is now consolidated as “goodbye.” I think most people today do not understand that “good” refers to “God,” instead probably thinking that it is something more like “good journey.”

In other languages, it is easier to see the influence of God, as in “adios” and “adieu” in Spanish and French. Each means “to God,” or “go with God,” but they are used, as far as I understand, a little differently. “Adios” is commonly used as a simple parting word. But “adieu” in French, and its cognate “addio” in Italian, are reserved for final partings, times when it is not certain that the people will meet again. For less definitive partings, French prefers “au revoir” (until we see each other again) and Italian prefers “arrivederci,” (same meaning). German also prefers this formulation in “auf wiedersehen.”

The English version of these latter parting phrases is, of course, “See you later,” which is only used in informal situations, however. For a fully formal parting, “Goodbye” is still the best goodbye.

Country First

As we approach the election of 2008, an unprecedented election in many ways, it is good to consider what we mean by “land” or “country” or “nation,” or “homeland”or “patriotism.”

The word “country” comes, surprisingly to me, from Latin. The original term seems to have been “terra contrata” or “contra(ta) terra,” meaning, roughly “that land over yonder” or “the land opposite where one is standing.” This came into old French as “cuntree” or “contree” and is recorded in English from about 1300, which would put it right in line with the avalanche of words that came into Anglo-Saxon with the Norman Conquest (see “History of English” on my website at emturnerenglish.com) and culminated about 1300 with the language we now know as English. The “u” of “country” really ought not to be in this word. Who knows where it drifted from?

But “country” feels like an English word, as does “land.” And in fact, “Land” is a German word, too, meaning exactly the same thing. We have an emotional attachment to the land of our birth, more I think than to the political boundary that encloses our “country.” For example, to me the most beautiful place in the world is one of the middle Tennessee valleys lying in the arms of the tableland (plateau) where I was born. This is the rich valley land below Green’s View, in Sewanee, Tennessee (Google it and you will see). Although I own none of the land there, I would take up arms to defend it if I were called upon to do so, it is that valuable to me. Perhaps I associate my own genetic heritage with the land. I don’t know. But it is precious to me.

The word “nation,” unlike its related word “native,”is a concept more of the head than the heart.
A “nation” is an agreement, first of all, among people to live together and adhere to certain rules of conduct. The rules governing our co-existence as Americans are called the Constitution, and while the Constitution is a very, very important document, I think most people in America today do not have a deep emotional understanding of how important it is. Not having experienced unfreedom, they do not understand freedom. Not having experienced torture, they are not bothered when their government engages in it (as long as the victim is out of sight). Not having known a servile and fettered press, they don’t understand the importance of a free journalism.

In this sense, I think some modern Americans have conflated the ideas of “native” and “nation.” They think that if you are a born citizen of this country, you must support every decision of its leaders regardless of whether that decision contravenes common sense, morality, or wisdom.

In the last eight years, the misguided US government has reacted in the worst possible ways to the trauma of 9/11. We have shunned any contact with our enemies beyond simply killing them. We have tortured (a thing never practiced as a policy by our country or advocated by its leaders until now). We have had stolen elections and voter suppression. We have invaded the wrong country and torn it apart, neglecting the country that was most responsible for the 9/11 attacks. We have witnessed the rise of spittle-flecked hate talk radio as some form of acceptable political discourse. We have dawdled and delayed rebuilding one of our most beautiful cities, destroyed after Hurricane Katrina. We have tolerated the placement of political partisans throughout the apparatus of government. And we have become a small, fearful, shrunken version of the ideals embodied in the Constitution, our national blueprint.

A symptom of this is the recent use of the term “homeland,” which is not a term common in English. Indeed, it suggests the German “Heimland,” and thus it does not have happy associations for Americans who fought against the Third Reich in World War II. Yet here we have a Department of Homeland Security,” a vast bureaucracy intent on data-mining information about us all. In this “homeland,” thingie, we all are supposed to show our patriotism (father-land-love) by wearing little flag lapel pins and putting our hands over our hearts and mouthing words in chorus and going off to fight in other countries that we just happen to be occupying for no discernible reason and dying quietly if we are so inferior as not to have health-care insurance. That is the patriotism of the Bush years: submission, conformity, sacrifice, and silence.

But all isn’t lost. Yet. I think the tide is turning. I think that the idea of a nation’s being fundamentally an agreement among people to live in peace with each other--as opposed to a series of warring little groups intent on telling the other groups what to do--is coming back into fashion. And the person who is bringing that idea back is the Democratic candidate for the presidency. That’s why Barack Obama’s campaign logo is at the top of this page.

My hope is that we learn again to abide by our national agreement to live together like civilized people. We have to relearn tolerance. We have to relearn a respect for intelligence and knowledge as opposed to this pervasive prejudice for ignorance that has poisoned the common well. We have to tune out the screaming spitters, starve them with our inattention, meet our neighbors and learn their concerns, care about each other. These are only some of the things we must do to regain our soul as a country and to be worthy of this beautiful land. But they are a beginning, and power-hungry natalists like Sarah Palin and shape-changers like John McCain cannot help us begin. They can only take us back into this terrible dark age we have suffered in the past eight years.

So--all two of you who read this: please vote! I have.

--oon words

The ending -oon is a rather funny feature of English. It doesn’t really sound English at all, and on further investigation, in most cases it is not from English but a mispronunciation of the ending -one (onay) in Italian or another Romance language.

Doubloon: from Spanish doblon, a 17th-century gold coin that was called a doubloon because it was double the value (twice the value) of another gold coin, the pistole.

The “doblon” came from Latin duplus, double. I suppose someone trying to bring “doblon” into English just didn’t know what to do with the second “o” and pronounced it “oo.”

However, there are several instances like this, where English borrowed a Latin word and mispronounced the ending “oon.”

Spittoon

A spittoon is a jar or other receptacle for spit (saliva).
People chewing tobacco (or otherwise just needing
to spit) used to use the spittoon. A spittoon also had a more
classy name, the cuspidor. As it turns out, though, the “spi” part of cuspidor traces back to the same humble roots as “spit” itself: Latin spuere. I was delighted to discover (okay, I’m weird) that “spew” comes from the same word. I had nothing in my mouth at the time, so I was unable to spew with joy, but I would’ve if I could’ve.

Balloon

“Balloon” is another charming mispronunciation from either French “ballon” or (I prefer) Italian “pallone.” Here the “-one” (“onay”) is an additive meaning “big.” So a “balloon” is a big ball. The word “ball” goes all the way back to Proto Indo-European as *bhal, meaning “a swelling.” So you could have asked an Indo-European kid for a ball 10,000 years ago and he would have understood you (if he had a ball).

Maroon

Maroon, again, is a mispronunciation, this time from “marron,” or “brown.” We in English have adopted the word but changed its color to a deep red rather than the brown it still is in French, Spanish, and Italian.
I don’t know about Portuguese or Romanian, though.

Senior Moments

Sometimes I wonder what old people think about at the end of their lives. Do they smile with gentle satisfaction about what they did right with this time on earth? Or do they sit in their wheelchairs racked with regret? Do they think about the good stuff, or the bad stuff, and what went wrong, and how much they may have been to blame, and who they didn’t get to go the prom with, and who they did? Do they think about the money they made or didn’t make? Do they wish they had kissed their cousins that day in the upstairs room when they were playing spin the bottle? Do they think about all the places they saw, or do they think more about the places they didn’t see? Maybe they just think about lunch.

I don’t know yet. But as the silver touches more and more of my hair, I think perhaps I will find out sooner than now seems possible.

The word “senex” in Latin gives us several important words in English: “senior,” of course, means “older.” “Senile” is a not-particularly-kind word meaning “having lost one’s mind from old age.” “Senescence” is the state in which senile people find themselves.

And finally, there is “Senate,” the council of elders or old people--those who are supposed to be wise. Judging from how well the Senate has done in recent years, I’d say we might as well call them Senilators.

The opposite of “senex” is “juvenus,” youth. That one gives us “junior,” “juvenile,” and “juvenilia” (the product of a young artist’s first efforts).

The old man in the photo is my great-great-grandfather, Cornelius McCardell, a newspaper mogul from Middletown, NY. I don't remember a lot about him, or the stories I heard about him from my mother, but I still have some household things from his house. When I sit in my wheelchair, I will regret that I no longer have my mother to remember things for me; luckily my daughter got her memory, and I still have the pieces, so I’m covered. My girl can put a piece of china in my hand and tell me who I was and my son will spin me tales of his imaginary world. I think it will be fine.

Laissez Faire

I never thought I would need to know very much about the economy. After all, I’ve never had any money to speak of. I thought, let the economy mind its own business and I’ll mind mine, quietly, under the radar, paying my taxes and hoping not to have to retire to a shack on one of my brothers’ properties too soon.

Well! What fun the last week has been! And how much I have learned as Wall Street moguls stride, in all their pomp and circumstance, up to Capitol Hill to beg the citizens of the country to bail them out of their sinking ship---but also caulk the ship and let it sail on to the same destinations. And the ships’ captains? They want their own little retirement islands somewhere in an undisclosed location. And us, the taxpayers? Well, we get to fix their ships, cancel their debts, AND treat them to some very pretty gilded castles on their islands.

What we are seeing is the collapse, at least intellectually, of the idea that the government should be really, really, teeny--responsible only for, according to Wikipedia, courts, defense, police, prison, and taxes. The people who believe this are one version of libertarian. They think, I suppose, that every person in the world deserves exactly what he or she gets and should suffer the punishment if anything goes wrong. The larger public should not be the keeper of its weakest members, and government should never help the unfortunate. Let private entities do that if they feel like it. Otherwise, it’s every man for himself, yadayada.

But Wall Street got way too greedy, this time, persuading Congress (through its lobbyists) to remove restraining regulations on lending so that mortgage companies could lend money to borrowers they knew couldn’t pay back their loans, and then bundling the loans so no one could tell what was a good loan and what was a bad loan. I don’t pretend to understand the details, but I do understand that many people got loans they had no business getting, and that these loans were later packaged and sold to investors as though they were worth something. But they weren’t. Now the big companies are failing right and left, the whole lending mechanism has ground to a halt, and there is no liquid capital to grease the workings of business. It is a true crisis for an economy based on lending and borrowing. And it’s entirely the result of intellectually dishonest dealings by people who should have known and did know better but couldn’t resist the slickness of the maneuver. Now, what’s happened to these free-market enthusiasts? They’ve screwed up big time. Truth will, as Shakespeare said, out. It has outed. And now it’s to Mama Government that they are running for a suck at the great public teat. Intellectually as well as financially these masters of the financial universe are bankrupt.

But I rant.

Today’s word (or rather, expression): laissez-faire. The phrase means “Let it alone,” or “Let [the economy] be free to do what it does without fetter or restraint.” The idea harks back to the 18th-century Adam Smith’s philosophy, expressed in his book, The Wealth of Nations. In it, Smith argued for a new way of viewing self-interest. He said that a society’s economy functions best when the society’s members are all acting out of their own essential self-interest. According to The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics (see link above),

“Someone earning money by his own labor benefits himself. Unknowingly, he also benefits society, because to earn income on his labor in a competitive market, he must produce something others value. In Adam Smith's lasting imagery, "By directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention."

I think that many people, faced with a darn good image, assume the image to be the same, or virtually the same, as the underlying reality. But I think the “invisible hand” of Smith is not, as many conservatives touchingly believe, a sort of deus ex machina that will rescue them from their foolishness. In fact, when stock-market moguls did some very foolish things for the last eight years, I suppose they were hoping that the invisible hand would pluck their debts back up into the sky and hide the debts in its little vest pocket. Turns out, the hand did not appear. Only the great milky bosom of Government presented itself, and at that, the Secretary of the Treasury and the head of the Federal Reserve are busily begging for more na-na.

Disgusting.

Deluge and Diluvium

As the people of New Orleans (now evacuating from that city) await the arrival of Gustav, a potentially devastating hurricane, my friend, action reporter Bill Capo of WLTV in New Orleans, reports that the mood is of “feelings of disbelief and dread citywide as we prepare to go through it again, and it could even be worse this time.”

The word “deluge” comes directly from Latin (via French) “diluvium” (flood). Diluvium, in turn, comes from de-luere, or to wash away. We have relatives of “luvere,” “to wash,” in our words “laundry,” (what one washes) “lavatory,” (the room where one washes), “lave” (to wash, but antique), and, surprisingly, “lye,” which has been used since the 12th century to produce soap.

One of the most quoted remarks about floods, “Apres moi, le deluge,” (“after me, the flood”) was not actually about flooding at all, but about the terrible situation created when King Louis XV ruined the economy of France by high living while his people suffered in poverty. The result was the French Revolution. In that case, the floods were not of water, but of blood.
A succinct explanation of the French situation follows (copied from a Paul Jay’s entry in the Save Our Wetlands website):

The leader of the most powerful country on earth, with an unquestioned faith in his divine right to rule and the absolute power of the centralized state, was the namesake for Louisiana.

When he died in 1715, Louis XIV had built France into the dominant power in Europe, but he bankrupted the nation, forcing him to levy high taxes on the peasantry while the nobility paid none at all. Most people lived in poverty while the King built an empire.

During the empire’s demise his great great grandson Louis XV ruled France and its possessions, which included the colonial city of New Orleans. He lived for indulgence and luxury as his people descended further into despair. It is said near his end he uttered the words "Après moi le deluge." After me come the floods.

(September 5, 2005
By Paul Jay, Chair,
Reprinted from: http://www.iwtnews.com
Independent World News)

My thoughts are with the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.

Lapse and Collapse

This is a beautiful image, but I don't know whom to credit for it. My apologies.




I first fully understood the meaning of “lapse” when, one summer, I was reading Virgil’s Aeneid with the brilliant Wayne J. Holman. I was doing my best, but frankly, Latin was hard for me. There was, I think, a reference to the Greek myth of Daedelus and his son, who rose on fabricated wings secured with wax to escape their prison in Crete. Icarus, the son, flew too near the blazing rays of the Mediterranean sun, wishing to reach the sun’s chariot. But he fell -- lapsus est -- and drowned.

Collapse (con-lapsus), then, means “to fall together,” and that seems to be an appropriate word for what is happening now in our environment, but so slowly that our hummingbird senses cannot fully appreciate it.
Here in East Tennessee this summer, we have had “air quality alerts” on more days than we have not had such warnings. The air is not easily breathable, though of course we must breathe or die, so we gasp on. My friend AS must stay indoors because her asthma is irritated by the air. The sky is white, not blue, a sort of muddy white. There is a stickiness in the air. East Tennesseeans do nothing about it because they are too fractious to do anything together except, perhaps, collapse (except for Chattanoogans, who have somehow learned the art of cooperation; Knoxvillians keep “knoxing” their heads against each other for no discernible reason).

So a “lapse” is a momentary fall; you can recover from it if those around you remain standing. But a “collapse” is total, and there is no easy recovery from it because there is no one left standing to pull you back up.

An interesting (and fully documented) take on this topic appears in “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed,” a book by Jared Diamond. I highly recommend it. At least, if we are walking into collapse, it would be good to have our eyes open while we do it.