Words are your Friends: The Joys of Etymology

One of the earliest experiences of an intellectual nature that I remember had to do with a Sunday-School lesson. Our Sunday-School met all together first, at around seven in the morning, and a sort of devotion was led by the Superintendent, after which we broke up into individual (age-specific) groups. The lesson I remember had to do with the etymology of the word "sincere". You can look it up: it comes from the roots "sine" without, in Latin, and "cere"; wax. The root "sine" gives us lots of words through the French cognate "sans-", such as sans-culotte, which one rarely uses, and of course Shakespeare's "All the world's a stage" speech (from Hamlet, I presume? Or perhaps I presume too much?) Sinecure, is also a word rarely used these days, and means an occupation that does not involve a great deal of responsibility. "Cure" must derive from the same origins as "curator", but that's only a guess. "Cere" is worth some investigation, since it sounds so much as if it has some relation to 'ceramics', and 'ceremony', and the goddess of the Earth, Ceres. Our month of January comes from the Roman god of beginnings, Janus, who was said to have two heads, one looking forwards, and the other looking back, and as such appropriate for being the patron of the new year, with its retrospective and prospective aspects. (There you have three words with the "spex" root [Wiktionary] meaning "observer", one who looks.)

I wish there were more of an etymological component to modern American education. In tandem with the American tradition of doing things differently than the rest of the world, there ought to be a moderating interest in those inquiries that look at connections with the rest of the world. We do not serve our children well if we give them the illusion that all good things that we enjoy were invented right here by Americans. The interconnectedness of all things is one of the greatest lessons one can learn, and Etymology draws on language, history, literature, vocabulary, and cognitive skills. One of the few areas in which there appears to be etymological interest on the part of the general public is about internet-related terminology. The etymology of blog is often talked about (evidently a contraction of Web Log). There is an interesting account of the origins of the phrase "suss out", which is used to mean 'check out' at the Grammarphobia Blog. How does the mind work? On the surface, we think of our brains as being simply fact-collecting organs, but more accurately, the brain collects facts, and connections between them. Collecting the facts is the easy part. What help we can give with the rest of it is sorely needed, and sadly absent from the experience of many of our youth. (I was trying to locate good further reading for the interested reader, but was frustrated by the aggressive tendency to classification that cognitive psychologists seem to have.

There is a theory that has been co-opted by a teaching philosophy --at least according to this site-- namely "constructivism". Unfortunately, they have made a part of their creed that any sort of testing is against the objectives of learning. While this is true to some extent, it does make it hard to call oneself a Constructivist if one does need to administer tests and evaluations. As a result of this fragmented nature of the theory of cognition, for many years it has been an unpopular area in which to specialize.)

To summarize, careful expression, careful use of words, the careful measured thought, all these things should have a larger share of what happens in this century, if we are to have a better public life for all of us.

Archimedes, hoping for a more articulate Presidency