Editor

Editor was once a Latin word meaning one who puts forth. That's why the chap or chappess who puts forth a book came to be known as an editor. As the putter-forth of a book usually has to make some alterations we then got our familiar verb edit. As those alterations are usually deletions, edited has come to mean cut.

However, it's worthwhile remembering that editor only got attached to books by coincidence. Etymologically, somebody who threw you out of a nightclub or a window could have been called an editor. Moreover, the original Roman editors were much more brutal people.

In the high and palmy state of Rome the Editor was the man who put out the games at the Colosseum. He obtained the Christians, the lions, the gladiators and decided, in his pomp, which would live and which die. A couple of descriptions will help:

The editor giving the games, usually to curry political favor with the mob, rode behind on a chariot perhaps drawn by exotic wild animals such as zebras or even ostriches.

And:


If the emperor was not in attendance, the producer (editor) of the games decided the fate of the victim. Even if defeated, a gladiator might be granted a reprieve (missus) if he fought well or, if neither fighter prevailed, both could be reprieved stans missus. But a gladiator also could be forced to fight again the same day, although that was considered bad form, and there were contests in which no reprieve was granted the loser (sine missione).

Ask any writer: nothing has changed.

The Inky Fool asks whether something should be cut

The Return of the Mission

I met a distressed vicar yesterday. The source of his troubles was not guilt or doubt or the approach of the rapture: the terror facing this particular vicar was that this week he has to write a Mission Action Plan.

The management jargon shuddered on the preacher's lips like a blasphemy. He had to write down goals and objectives and mission statements and feed forward his blue-sky ideas from outside the box. That's what a Mission Action Plan (or MAP!) is.

He asked me whether I would write it for him, assuring me that it would be a work of pure fiction anyway. I refused because I am lazy. But as I wandered away from God and towards the pub, it occurred to me that the word mission has come full circle. The primary meaning of mission, as defined in the OED, is:

In Trinitarian theology: the sending into the world of the Son or Spirit by the Father, or of the Spirit by the Son, esp. for the purpose of salvation.

This is the sense that the word had in 1530. Mission was a solely religious word for the first hundred years of its existence in English. It's from the Latin misso, meaning send, and is, or was, the exclusive preserve of missionaries. It wasn't until 1626 that Francis Bacon invented the idea of godless, diplomatic mission, and it wasn't until 1910 that anybody had the idea that soldiers might be sent on a mission. The missions impossible and accomplished of soldiers and spies are a twentieth century invention.

And shooting people, as everybody knows, is cool and efficient. So it's the military sense of mission that was eventually stolen by business-speak and by management consultants. The modern Director of Regional Sales no longer has a job, he has a mission, just like a soldier, a mission that he must complete at all costs (or, preferably, minimum cost).

And guess who appropriated the word mission from the horrid world of management jargon and gibberish? That's right. The Church of England.

So mission has come full circle: from theology to diplomacy, to the military, to management-speak and back at last to its true home in the church. It is the prodigal son of the language, sleeping among the swine.

Indeed, I think the story of mission has already been described in the Ecclesiastes:

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us.

And that is, of course, the origin of the phrase nothing new under the sun.

I cannot believe that this graph exists

P.S. Yes. There will be a post on the missionary position some time later in the week. I may have to do some research in the British Library.

Garnered

According to the news :

Intelligence garnered from waterboarded detainees was used to track down al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and kill him

This is one of those awkward statements that will make any right-thinking person wrestle with the thorny question of where the word garner comes from and what exactly it means.

Garner is one of those strange verbs that lives only inside the pages of a newspaper. I don't believe that in my long and intricate life I have ever garnered anything. It's not one of those verbs that you use.

'What are you planning to do this afternoon?'

'Oh, I'm planning to garner.'

Doesn't work, does it? Even if you put in an object for the verb you still end up with:

'I was planning to garner some stamps for my collection.'

But newspapers get to use garner without an eyelid being batted. This seems unfair, why should journalists keep all the garnering to themselves? It comes, since you ask, from the French word grenier, which meant granary. The R got moved by a process that etymologists call metathesis and so we ended up with the noun garner which also meant granary.

Then the noun was changed to a verb. Just as a person can be housed or hospitalized, so grain could be garnered, or put into the garner. To garner is to granary-ize.

The metaphorical use of garner was, of bloody course, invented by Shakespeare. In every marriage guidance counsellor's favourite play Othello tells Desdemona that she is the place:

...where I have garner'd up my heart,
Where either I must live, or bear no life;
The fountain from the which my current runs,
Or else dries up...

And then kills her a few scenes later. Anyway, the OED traces garner as a rather obscure word meaning to store up, as in a granary, until the nineteenth century when it disappears. There's no sense in the dictionary of obtain, as in the news article above.

So what the hell happened? Some strange agricultural journalist with a penchant for granarizing facts?

Must be, I suppose. And it seems to have happened in about 1980. Here's a graph of the frequency of the use of the word garnered in English.

From that graph garner what you can. And remember, it has nothing to do with garnish.

Medioxumate

If you are medioxumate it means that you are a god, but only a middling sort of god. You aren't a top god like Allah or Jehovah, but you aren't a godling either. It's a rather useful sort of word for bringing in a qualification when discussing divinity. If you hear somebody described as a sex god, you can agree, but add that they are only a medioxumate one. This won't cause offence: partly because being a medioxumate sex god is better than not being a sex god at all, and partly because nobody in their right mind knows what medioxumate means.

The Toothache God of Kathmandu is a proper example of a medioxumate god. He's the chap in the picture and is only usually worshipped when a dentist is unavailable, because as Shakespeare put it: There was never yet philosopher that could endure the toothache patiently.

Dinosaurs and Tennyson

I was shocked to learn recently that brontosauruses never existed. Not only does that mean that the toy of my childhood was mischristened, it also means that there is no creature called a thunder lizard, and I think that's a shame.

You see, sauros was just the Greek word for lizard so all those sauruses that we know and love are just something-lizards. Brontes was a cyclops whose name meant The Thunderer so a brontosaurus was a thunder-lizard. A stegosaurus, whose back was covered with armour plating, was a roof-lizard; and a tyrannosaurus was a king-lizard, from the same root as tyrant.

Tyrannosaurus rex is funny name. Sophocles' Greek play Oedipus Tyrannos was known in Latin as Oedipus Rex because tyrannos and rex are the same thing: a king. So a tyrannosaurus rex is a king-lizard king.

Dinosaur itself comes from the Greek deinos and means frightening-lizard.

The reason that brontosauruses never existed is that the species had already been discovered and named. The chap who thought that he'd found a new kind of dinosaur had, in fact, merely found a slight variant on the old apatosaurus. And what does apatosaurus mean? Deceptive-lizard.

Oh, the lies of my youth!

Anyway, when I think about dinosaurs I always go back to what I believe is the first dinosaur poem. It's a section of In Memoriam by Tennyson probably written in the 1840s. Tennyson has been comforting himself with the thought that though individual humans die, humanity remains. Nature doesn't care about individuals, but looks after species and types.

He then remembers that the (reasonably) newly-discovered dinosaurs prove that that is not the case. This results in renewed misery for Tennyson and one of the greatest passages of poetry in English.

"So careful of the type?" but no.
From scarped cliff and quarried stone
She cries, "A thousand types are gone:
I care for nothing, all shall go.


"Thou makest thine appeal to me:
I bring to life, I bring to death:
The spirit does but mean the breath:
I know no more." And he, shall he,


Man, her last work, who seem'd so fair,
Such splendid purpose in his eyes,
Who roll'd the psalm to wintry skies,
Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,


Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation's final law --
Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek'd against his creed --


Who loved, who suffer'd countless ills,
Who battled for the True, the Just,
Be blown about the desert dust,
Or seal'd within the iron hills?


No more? A monster then, a dream,
A discord. Dragons of the prime,
That tare each other in their slime,
Were mellow music match'd with him.


O life as futile, then, as frail!
O for thy voice to soothe and bless!
What hope of answer, or redress?
Behind the veil, behind the veil.

Tennyson contemplating the brontosaurus

Venustate

To venustate something is to make it utterly beautiful. The minutes or hours that you spend each morning before the bathroom's looking glass is, I hope, an act of venustation.

Venustate pops up in a couple of seventeenth century dictionaries, but then faded away and perished. I fear that this is because in the intervening centuries few things have been made beautiful. Although, it is more likely that the adjective venust from which it derives has died too.

There is too little venusty in the world. We need venustation. Go forth and venustate.

Nothing to do with ABBA

A fellow was shot today in Abbottabad. It may have been yesterday. I'm not sure. What I can say for certain is that it is no coincidence that Abbottabad sounds like the English word Abbot, for the town is named after an English general named James Abbott.

This brings us to the central mystery of the shooting in Abbottabad: how did the surname Abbott come about. 'Simple!' I hear you cry. 'One of his ancestors must have been an abbot.'

Not so simple. The earliest Mr Abbot (Alwoldus Abbas) is recorded in 1111 AD, by which time priests were absolutely and completely banned from getting married and making babies. Of course, they still did have babies, but the babies were illegitimate.

Abbot as a surname probably arose not as a description of a profession (like Smith or Baker), but as a nickname, presumably for somebody rather pious and fatherly.

For abbot, ultimately means father. It comes from the Latin abbatem, which is the accusative of abbas, which comes from the Greek abbas, which comes from the Aramaic word abba.

How did an Aramaic word get into Latin? From Jesus, or more specifically from Mark's Gospel. Jesus would have spoken Aramaic, but the Gospels were written in Greek. Occasionally, though, the evangelists, for some reason, felt it necessary to mention the original word* that Jesus had used. For example:

And he said, Abba, Father, all things are possible unto thee; take away this cup from me: nevertheless not what I will, but what thou wilt.

So abba was an Aamaic honorific meaning Father. How Mr Laden felt about living in a place named after a Christian priest and a Jewish father is unknown. I hope that if the special forces were able to get one answer out of him, it would have been that.

None of which has anything at all to do with the Swedish pop maestros ABBA, who are named after a Swedish fish-canning company.

Since 1838

*Well, sort of. The quote actually comes from the agony in the garden, of which there were no waking witnesses. So, like me, it's either odd or inspired.