Hmmm. Where am I going? Oh that cursed ignorant laziness. Maybe I should first tackle the subject of verbicide en masse. Mass verbicide. As in, what happened to Latin mass? Latin is still around even though in my youth it was called a dead language. Catholicism pretty much stopped using it when I was young. I thought this a good idea at the time. It seemed that sitting in church was hard enough without being steeped in ignorance of what was being said. Now I’m not so sure. (I was not a Catholic but this did not prevent my thinking about jettisoning Latin for English.) Latin is not exactly dead, however. You can even study it in a virtual classroom, like that of Signum University. I’d prefer to learn ancient Greek (were I not lazy).
C.S. Lewis used Latin in That Hideous Strength. Now there was one smart man. According to Alastair Fowler he kept up with his preferred languages, including Norse and Italian, with reading groups. (Yale Review 10-2003) If you read the novel, you’ll note that it’s not the ignorant but smart people of the N.I.C.E. (National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments) who changed the meanings of words. On the other hand, they don’t, iirc, do this by reassigning meanings or trying to degrade individual words. They seem rather to go about demolishing meaning itself. As in, nothing means anything. Or maybe words mean what we NICE people want them to mean at the moment. And we may want something else next moment. It’s like the NICE are becoming willfully senile. Willfully turning that part of the brain devoted to language into a worthless object. Ask yourself. Can anything mean something except anything? How can nothing mean anything? How can any-thing mean no-thing? Even I know nothing doesn’t exist.
It’s Nothing if not Nice
Ignorance may be a fluctuating condition. “We do not know.” (The word’s origin meaning.) But willful ignorance is another thing. Would the origin of the word “shyster,” as ferreted out by Gerald Leonard Cohen, be considered willful? —or would it be plain ignorance, unadorned by willfulness? Cohen spent several years on the ferreting. Turns out shyster derives from “shisers,” at base from a German word meaning poop. In 1843 a news editor got the word wrong, and shyster has been around ever since. So, no, willful is not the modifier here. The editor was simply ignorant of the word he was attempting to use. (See the online review of Comments on Etymology by Allan Metcalf in Tablet Magazine, May 6, 2013.*)
But isn’t it fun, this trying to source out the language? Can’t ignorance make things fun? After arriving here in the flesh on the planet (having been miraculously extrapolated with arduous ardor out of invisible encoded debris)... all we have to do is reproduce flesh and learn to maintain it for a short while. That’s where our effort goes. But, once you get the hang of that nucleosynthetic explosive scattering, and discovering how your labor helps it make and maintain us, the rest can be quite fun. You can just hang out, maybe relax with friends and think about stuff, lend a hand. Or see what everybody has written. Check out the words, think how they got here and what might happen if they go away: Woman shall not live by bread alone.
Another thing this woman knows: “Let there be light!” means also “Let there be photons! That quanta with other radiation, carrier of electromagnetic force!” It does not mean let there be dark. “Qui Verbum Dei contempserunt, eis auferetur etiam verbum hominis.” As in, “They that have despised the Word of God, from them shall the word of man also be taken away.” (That Hideous Strength 418)
Words? go away?
I remember reading somewhere .... “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my word shall not fade, degrade or pass away.”
That quotation is found thrice in the gospels and in hundreds of different languages, as well. And it takes a load off my indolent mind. But, ignoramus that I am—and perhaps far too content in it—I still firmly believe that ignorance changes the language, and that this goes largely undocumented. However, my head better go lie down. I’ve just finished remaking the reasonable world out of ignorance, using nothing but words—again. Is it any good? Unlike God after creating, I can’t tell for sure.
Anyway, what book shall I listen to while I lie here, resting?
© S. Dorman 2024