Civilization

 April 9 Word of the Day: Civilization 

“CIVIL. CIVILITY. The tendency which there is in the meaning of words to run to the surface, till they lose and leave behind all their deeper significance, is well exemplified in the words ‘civil’ and ‘civility’ – words of how deep an import once, how slight and shallow now,” writes Richard Chenevix Trench in ‘A select glossary of English words used formerly in senses different from their present’, Second edition, revised and improved, London, John W. Parker and Son, 1859. Appropriate on a day when an uncivil megalomaniac may catch the world’s attention merely by blurting online that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” on his social media platform, the civilization in question being the Iranian, often thought of as the Persian civilization; or does he mean the American civilization? He doesn’t say. Trench says, “A civil man now is one observant of slight external courtesies in the mutual intercourse between man and man; a civil man once was one who fulfilled all the duties and obligations flowing from his position as a ‘civis,’ and his relations to the other members of that ‘civitas’ to which he belonged, and ‘civility’ the condition in which those were recognized and observed.” Somewhere between these two meanings of civil falls the shadow of the megalomaniac, one who reportedly switches from a pretence of civility to a menacing uncivility in a moment, for whom civilization is a word of most slight and shallow meaning. Trench has words for this word too: “The gradual departure of all deeper significance from the word ‘civility’ has obliged the creation of another word, ‘civilization’, which only came up toward the conclusion of the last century. Johnson does not know it in his Dictionary, except as a technical legal term to express the turning of a criminal process into a civil one; and, according to Boswell, altogether disallowed it in the sense which it has now acquired.” Used in its modern sense, threats of erasure of a civilization from a megalomaniac prompt every effort of civil individuals, in both senses defined by Trench, to reject and denounce this threat, and to call out the dangerous nature of the social media star, failing as he does to fulfil duties and obligations. As this cruel political game goes, the threat and its deeper import is soon superseded by other events that relegate the original blurt to a wound on the collective mind, like all the other scars left on civil societies everywhere as they absorb the true meaning of his lonely platform fantasies.

 

Deadly

 April 4 Word of the Day: Deadly

 

“DEADLY. This and ‘mortal’ are often synonymes now; thus, ‘a deadly wound’ or ‘a mortal wound’: but they are not invariably so; ‘deadly’ being always active, while ‘mortal’ is often passive, and signifying not that which inflicts death, but that which suffers death; thus, ‘a mortal body’, or body subject to death, but not now ‘a deadly body.’” Thus, Richard Chenevix Trench in his ‘A select glossary of English words used formerly in senses different from their present’ Second edition, revised and improved (London, Parker, 1859). To what extent Trench’s Victorian senses of the word have any relationship to the contemporary Australian Indigenous use of ‘deadly’ is wide open to discussion. ‘Deadly’ here is a term of highest praise: excellent, great, fantastic, cool, awesome. Emerging in the seventies, such is its widespread use that by the nineties national awards were initiated for excellence in music, sport, entertainment, and community achievement among Indigenous Australians called, very straightforwardly, the Deadly Awards. Theories for the emergence of this present sense of ‘deadly’ are based as much on guesswork and circumstance as empirical evidence. That the adjective is used in Ireland in similar positive ways is one thing, while the OED tells us that ‘deadly’ used in the English colloquial sense of extremely or excessively dates from at least the 16^th century. It’s worth keeping in mind the sense, too, of anything about which there can be no argument at all, like death itself: to stamp anything as ‘deadly’ is to say that that’s the final word. At which stage a word turns from slang into common speech is a perennial question of vocabulary. Its use in this awesome sense may and in fact does differ in meaning and cultural value in the Irish, English, and Australian contexts. The word ‘deadly’ for First Nations Australians will have significances all their own, and within the reality of the fatal impact. Trench continues: “It was otherwise once. ‘Deadly’ is the constant word in Wiclif’s Bible, wherever in the later versions ‘mortal’ occurs,” then he quotes, “Elye was a deedli man lyk us, and in preier he preiede that it schulde not reyne on the erthe, and it reynede not three yeeris and sixe monethis. Jam. V. 17. Wiclif.” In the Letter of James, Elijah is presented as a ‘deadly man’, which is to say mortal just like us, but that through prayer we like him can do things that are not only good, excellent, cool, but even awesome. Any body at all.  

 

 

Painfulness

 

A factor almost universally ignored nowadays by critics and readers is the extent of the pains a writer, or any artist at times, went to in assembling the created work. Critics behave as though the work is there primarily as a test of their superior reading skills, their special criteria for praise or dismissal. The intellectual, experiential, and emotional realities that made the work possible count for nothing much, or so it appears. The common reader, similarly, too often seems to talk about works in the same way they treat other phenomena, as consumables whose existence arrived on the shelf purely by chance, there for an hour’s passing distraction. This factor came to mind today re-reading a favourite Victorian author, Richard Chenevix Trench. He writes: ‘[Thomas] Fuller, our Church historian, having occasion to speak of some famous divine that was lately dead, exclaims, “Oh the painfulness of his preaching!” We might assume at first hearing, and if we did not know the former uses of ‘painfulness,’ that this was an exclamation wrung out at the recollection of the tediousness which he inflicted on his hearers. Far from it; the words are a record not of the pain which he caused to others, but of the pains which he bestowed himself: and I am persuaded, if we had more ‘painful’ preachers in the old sense of the word, that is, who took pains themselves, we should have fewer ‘painful’ ones in the modern sense, who cause pain to their hearers. So too Bishop Grosthead is recorded as “the painful writer of two hundred books” – not meaning hereby that these books were painful in the reading, but that he was laborious and painful in their composing.’ (‘English, Past and Present: Five Lectures.’ 3^rd Edition, Revised. London, 1856, page 180.) The Revd Trench of Itchen Stoke calls this “a very easy misapprehension,” adding it to the many in his lectures he went to pains in tracing, in order to illustrate how meanings change over the centuries. Linguistics, or philology, was a second string to Trench’s bow, whose several painful books of theology and biblical interpretation assisted his eventual advance to the position of Archbishop of Dublin. In fact, his mind- and time-expanding skills of etymology are one of the original inspirations for the Oxford English Dictionary, one of the supreme results of that Age of dedicated painfulness. He hadn’t time to help compile the OED, but he is regarded as one of its three founders. His different word studies books enunciated a complete and erudite rationale for collecting instances of word change in the literature, formulated before the genesis of the Dictionary itself in 1857. An entire literature has since evolved around OED editors and contributors past and present, lucid and less so, readers of this biographical literature avid to admire the extreme painfulness of their scholarship. Some of it on a par with Bishop Grosthead, better known by Trench’s time as Robert Grosseteste of Lincoln, one of England’s foremost medieval statesmen, theologians and philosophers, as well as being thought the real founder of the scientific method at Oxford.