Druid Journal » Word and Spirit

Story, History, and Meaning

Jeff Lilly — Fri, 11 May 2012 22:42:39 +0000

In the episode of Faith, Fern and Compass we posted this week, Alison and I talked a bit about stories, and what their purpose might be. Is storytelling something with evolutionary origins? If so, what? And why? It’s a completely open question, but an essential one: stories and histories, real or imagined, provide entertainment, bind communities together, give our lives meaning and provide guidance and comfort in difficult times. As we discuss in the podcast, figuring out how to cultivate storytelling and other types of art — while somehow accommodating the social upheaval they inevitably give rise to — is critical. As Susan Biali says, “We cannot afford to waste human gifts. We need to learn how to nurture the creative nature.”

After the podcast, I went back and looked a little deeper into the etymologies of history and story. There is an unfortunate urban legend that history literally means, and comes from, the words “his story”, and while there is a faint glimmer of truth in that — and of course the deeper, more abstract truth, that what we call “history” is too often the story of what dead white guys were doing — the fact is that history and story have more to do with wizard than anything else. These are all the same word, at root; they ultimately arise from a term meaning one who is wise.

With wizard it’s most obvious: the Proto Indo European weid, meaning “to see” or “to know” descended into Proto Germanic as wisaz and Old English as wis. In Middle English it was combined with the suffix -ard, indicating one who is or does (as in coward, drunkard), and made to mean one who is wise — perhaps even too wise.

But in Greek, this same Proto Indo European root weid became his (“wise”), and was combined with tor (“one who is or does”) to mean, basically, wizard; and the term histor was often used to mean “old man, wise man, judge”. A historia, then, would be a tale told by such a wizard. It was borrowed directly into Latin, and thence into French, becoming estorie.

It was then borrowed twice by English — once to become history, and once to become story. For a long time these two words were just two versions of the same term, like want to and wanna, but eventually story (the less formal version) took on connotations of ficticiousness and frivolity and went its own way.

Spiritually both history and story share connotations of a fertile, abundant path through grounded, earthy territory, rounding up with powerful motion that ends in an expression of fortitude and stamina. The hi- at the beginning of history adds a depth of rootedness, of something arising from a hearth and home. It is this rootedness that gives history its peculiar power to give guidance, bind communities, and infuse our lives with meaning.

Sodden Spring

Jeff Lilly — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 02:55:15 +0000

Seattle, they say, is a rather wet city. But the last few days were sunny and warm, so I guess I was lulled into thinking (wishing? hoping?) that perhaps the worst of the showers were over. Late yesterday, in the golden late evening, Alison in a coat against the wind, and I in a light sweater, walked to the bicycle shop, a pleasant two miles away through neighborhoods abloom with daffodils and cherries and along the cedar-trimmed Green Lake. Her bike was waiting, freshly oiled and polished and adjusted and ready to go. I set out on foot for the return journey, while she rode in circles around me, testing her balance and getting back into the swing of riding after a two-year break. We made it less than a block before it started raining.

Seattle rain (in my limited experience of it) is generally gentle, misty, gusty, and fitful; it’s easily dealt with if you have a light coat. When the rain got harder and harder, I felt sure it would let up soon. But within five minutes it had turned into a serious downpour; and five minutes later, when the hail started, I told Alison to go on home, so that her bright bike wouldn’t suffer in the weather too much. I jogged soggily after her, my sweater quickly growing heavy and cold with the rain and ice. Surely it couldn’t go on like this much longer…!

Well, I was right, but by the time it let up, I was just a few blocks from home. As it turned out, Alison wasn’t far ahead, because the rain and darkness made it too dangerous to bike, and she’d had to walk most of the distance. When we got inside, panting and shivering and dripping icy water everywhere, Cu Gwyn did not approve at all.

Sodden is a delightful old word that goes back to Proto European seut, meaning “boil”. In Proto Germanic it became seuthanan, and in Old English seoþan; and this word eventually became modern English seethe. But the past participle of seoþan was soden; and this broke away from seethe and became an adjective in its own right, sodden. Since things that are boiled are also quite wet, sodden came to mean “soaked” as well as “boiled”. By the end of the 19th century, the “boiled” meaning was forgotten.

Sodden and sadden are similar in sound, and carry much the same phonosemantics: a promising fresh beginning, a turning point or doorway, and a fall to grounding and dissolution. While sadden carries the flat-ah vowel sound of sad, balanced and static, sodden has the short-o sound of sod, fundamental, Source, beginning. Despite its association with water, it is a word of returning to earth.

When Alison got out of the shower, she was beaming. “I think everyone remembers a day,” she said, “maybe in high school or college, when you went to a water park, or to a rainy soccer game or something, and you get totally soaking wet, and you had a fantastic time… I feel like that now.”

“Yup,” I said. “Busch Gardens, with the German club. May of 1991. I’ll always remember it.” The springtime of life, the springtime of the year, and the sodden blessing of rain on the earth.

Wilderness Among Us

Jeff Lilly — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 01:04:15 +0000

Alison and I have been spending a lot of time in Seattle’s parks this spring, and it got me thinking about the word park. It’s an old Proto-Germanic word, originally parruk, a type of enclosure for animals, such as a sheep pen. By the mid 13th century it was used more to refer to enclosures for animals that would be hunted; and in the 1660′s in London, these enclosures were most often areas that were kept semi-wild so that the nobility could easily hunt inside the city. The step from that meaning to “any preserved natural area” was a short one.

“Parking” vehicles comes from the early 19th-century usage of arranging military vehicles in a park. Spiritually park is an enclosed, firmly rooted Source energy, but one which holds much motion and power.

One of my pet peeves is an old joke that is supposed to illustrate how insane English is: “it’s the only language where you park on a driveway and drive on a parkway.” Ha ha! Oh, such wit. This chestnut even has its own facebook page (which I’m not going to favor with a link — you can find it yourself if you’re so inclined). Why does it peeve me? It’s just an innocent little quirk of the language, after all. And English is pretty crazy, am I right?

Sigh. See, I’m a linguist, and I study languages like ornithologists study birdsong. For me, a languages are beautiful, delicate structures built up organically over thousands and thousands of years. They aren’t just crazy random collections of rules and words; they evolved, and they do things for a reason. They contain some weird things, just as evolution does some weird things (like, why is the left half of the body controlled by the right side of the brain?), but there’s a reason.

We park on a driveway because a driveway is a way though a yard, or on a property, where we can drive. Sometimes we do park in it, too, but that’s just because we can never find time to clean out the garage. And we drive on a parkway because a parkway is a way for us to drive through a park, or at least a landscaped, green area. There are all sorts of lovely nuances in these words as well — the fact that the modifiers drive and park carve out the semantic space, distinguishing themselves by the function of the “way” and the location of the “way” respectively. You can also distinguish “ways” by speed (speedway, expressway), cost (freeway, tollway), size (broadway, alleyway), the type of vehicle or moving object (railway, motorway, bikeway, walkway, footway, headway), the distance (halfway, midway), what you do while traveling it (raceway, runway), the “surface” (waterway, airway, stairway, subway), direction or path (beltway, byway), the paving surface (causeway, from Latin via calciata, “paved way”), and how lovely it is (fairway). There are subtle rules for creating new compounds, too — if I tell you they’re installing a fishway on the dam, you probably wouldn’t bat an eyelash; but if I try and use a word like congressmanways to talk about the halls of Congress, you’d look at me like I’m nuts. You know, subconsciously, that “way” only works for regularly traveled paths, and it really likes to combine only with nouns of only one or maybe two syllables, accented on the first syllable for preference.

English isn’t crazy — it’s subtle and beautiful. You just have to be patient with it, respect it, and pay attention to it; then it will reveal its beauty.

Like birdsong. Like anything that’s wild.

Druid Journal » Word and Spirit

Story, History, and Meaning

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