crocodile and heaps and acervation and sorites

One of the reasons I write is that I learn so much through doing so. What begins as an investigation into one word or concept turns into an exploration of something seemingly completely different but, at the same time, completely explicable from the perspective of my starting point. As you may recall, I took a detour or digression from my first essay on the various words for "sharp" by examining near neighbors in the Unabridged. The two nearest neighbors I am exploring are those words connected with "horns" (previous essay; Greek word-keros and Latin word-cornu) and those derived from "heaps" (this essay; Latin-acervus and Greek-soros).

In a nutshell, what has happened in English is that the Latin root is maintained literally to suggest an accumulation or heap of something, while the Greek root comes into English as sorites. Sorites became a philosophical term in English, however, because the Greek word sorites became the basis of a logical fallacy explored first by the Stoics probably in the 3rd century BCE. Now is the time to explain what I mean, first beginning with the Latin root.

Acervus et al.

The OED lists eight words beginning with acerv, all of which derive from the same Latin word meaning a "heap," usually of corn, grain, money or a funeral pile (pyre). The verb acervate, meaning to "pile up" or "heap together" is the oldest, appearing in Cockeram's 1612 dictionary. Interesting to me is that Cockeram defines acervate as "to mough up," but the OED doesn't have an entry for mough! I suppose it meant to "pile." Acervation was the earliest noun form to appear, in 1676. From a definition of Aggregate in 1755: "The complex or collective result of the conjunction or acervation of many particulars." It was not until 1875 that the first appearance of acervuline is attested, meaning "of the form or appearance of little heaps." "The cells became a mass of rounded chambers, irregularly piled up in..an acervuline manner." You would have thought that acervulus, first appearing in 1806, would have meant "little heap," but that word took on a very important technical meaning in early brain research. Fyfe's Anatomy of the Human Body in that year has the following: "Near, or in the Substance of the Pineal Gland, small Calcareous Concretions are sometimes found, called, by Soemmerring, Acervulus Cerebri, from their being generally found collected in a heap." Later in the century these little heaps were popularly referred to as "brain sand," a term still used, as a quick Google search will demonstrate.

Thus, we see that when the acerv root was maintained, it referred to heaps or little heaps of something, while the word acervulus found place in the study of the pineal gland. I would not be speaking truly, however, if I claimed that the words derived from acerv were widely used today. They are not.

Sorites

When we move to the Greek word for heaps, sorites (three syllables), we have a completely different story. Oh, to be sure, the original meaning of the term in Classical Greek was a heap, usually of grain or corn, but an argument attributed to one of the early Stoics, Eubulides of Miletus, completely changed the tenor of the word so that rather than referring to a heap of corn or grain, a sorites became known as the "problem of the heaps." Here is the sorites in a nutshell.

As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy shows, the sorites was a paradox presented by means of heaps of grain.

1 grain of wheat does not make a heap.
If 1 grain of wheat does not make a heap then 2 grains of wheat do not.
If 2 grains of wheat do not make a heap then 3 grains do not.
...
If 9,999 grains of wheat do not make a heap then 10,000 do not.
-------------------------------------------
10,000 grains of wheat do not make a heap.

The "paradox" is easy to spot. If we have one grain of wheat, we know we cannot characterize it as a "heap." But, we also know that if we have 10,000 such grains it is certainly a heap. However, if you add one grain at a time, we do not know when precisely we pass over from indiviudual grains to a "heap" of wheat. Thus, we can and we cannot have a heap of wheat at the same time. Ascribed also to Eubulides (by the 3rd Cent CE biographer Diogenes Laertius) was the nearly identical problem of the "bald man"--maybe a little too close to home for some of us (!), which can be stated in the same way as the "heaps" paradox. The article goes on to talk about how contemporary philosophers have handled this paradox, but I am not interested in that issue now.

When sorites, then, came into English, it did not come in as heap but rather in reference to the logical problem mentioned above. The word sorites first appeared in English in 1551, to refer to "a series of propositions, in which the predicate of each is the subject of the next, the conclusion being formed of the first subject and the last predicate." You could even get quite technical (which I will not do), dividing these sorites into ascending (Aristotelian) or descending (Goclenian--after the logician Rudolf Goclenius (1547-1628) sorites. We see the way that the literal meaning of the term ("grain") falls into the background through this 1588 quotation: "As of many graynes is made a heape of corne, so of many degrees an argument called Sorites by this enthymemiticall progression." Sorry, no time to deal with the enthymeme here, except to say that it is, for Aristotle, less than a syllogism but still a true statement. It is "rhetorical" rather than "logical" proof.

Concluding with Crocodile/Crocodilite

Now that we know what the sorites is--a paradox of argument--we can conclude with this delicious 1798 quotation. "We have seen syllogisms, crocodiles, enthimemas, sorites &c. explained and tried upon a boy of nine." Crocodiles?? What could that possibly mean? Well, the OED has this under one of the definitions of crocodile: "name of an ancient sophism or dilemma. See crocodilite." So, of course, we go to crocodilite, and we find this qutation from 1655:

"The Crocodilite, so named from this Ægyptian Fable: A Woman sitting by the side of Nilus, a Crokodile snatch'd away her Child, promising to restore him, if she would answer truly to what he asked; which was, Whether he meant to restore him or not? She answer'd, Not to restore him, and challenged his promise, as having said the Truth. He reply'd, that if he should let her have him, she had not told true."

We smile. The mother is on the "horns of a dilemma" posed by the crocodile. If she says that she thinks the crocodile will eat her son, the crocodile will agree and do so. If she says that she thinks the crocodile will return him, he answers as he does in the riddle. Thus a crocodile is a "no win" situation.

Enough for tonight. Let's return to "sharp" words.

1907