inadvertent and advert and president clinton

I have a view of words and language which informs this and several other essays. Many English word are derived, of course, from Greek and Latin. But the history of how each word comes into English is always different. For example, sometimes the Greek or Latin word has two or more significations. When the word comes into English, it usually brings all the meanings along with it, or at least there are isolated attestations of all the meanings, but sooner or later many of the meanings begin to drop by the wayside, and we are left with one and only one meaning for the word. A good example is the word for the day: inane. The word first came to my consciousness in college, I think, when people accused me of saying inane things. "Bill, that's inane!" would be a frequent chorus I heard from one of my friends. So, I learned the word to mean something silly, frivolous or just plain stupid. Nothing in the past 35 years of my acquaintance with people or the language brought a richer field of meaning into the word. But, I vaguely knew that the word inanition (weariness or exhaustion) must be related to inane in some way, though I was too incurious or busy over the years to figure out that relationship. This essay and the next will probe that connection.

An Image

But I am getting ahead of myself, even if the example just given was necessary. My view of language is that it is like a collapsed tent, or a tent whose central wooden pole has been taken down. At one time the pole was there, holding up the tent, allowing wide space for several to sleep and giving protection from the elements. But then, either because of a storm or because it is just time to pack up and move along, the tent pole came down and the tent collapsed. So it is with language. At one time most words had multiple meanings in English, derived from a multiplicity of underlying Latin/Greek meanings and supplemented by several centuries of English usage.

But, as we have become a more fast-paced society, the function of words has changed, I believe. Oh, they are still used to establish meaning and communication, but they now can be likened to cheap bricks that one throws into a faux-facade that looks genuine but really is as phony as a $3 bill. Words are not elegant pieces, finely crafted, carefully fit into their proper place in the rising structures of our society. Thus, since all we need is the faux-facade, we really don't have much need for anything other than a block of fired clay to cram into the wall. This means that words only need have one meaning; that they need not have much of a pictorial capacity; that they ought not communicate ambiguity or levels of meaning. The tent of words has collapsed in our culture, and single-meanings is all that interests us.

Except that, when we think of it for a minute, we know that single-meanings for most or all words simply isn't the way it is and, furthermore, if it were the case, it would take some of the fun out of life. Or, to use a different analogy, we know that words are more like threads than bricks, more like something that gets weaved together with other threads to form a sturdy sweater or garment, than something that simply has utilitarian value. We know there is beauty in words, even though we don't think we have the time, or don't want to take the time, to see how we can cultivate beauty through their use. Thus, what I am trying to do in my word page (and I promise I will get to inane sooner or later) is to see if we can put the tent pole of language back up again or, to change the analogy once more, blow air back into the empty balloon of language.

A Closing Example

Well, I guess we will have to wait until the next essay to get to inane, but let me finish by giving one common example. Every educated person uses the word inadvertent, meaning unintentional, at times. We frequently use it humorously--"oh, that must have been inadvertent," when we mean exactly the opposite. And, this meaning of the word is richly attested. Cowper said in 1784: "An inadvertent step may crush the snail/ That crawls at evening in the public path." From Lowell, "Another secret charm of the book is its inadvertent humor."

But these are all rather recent attestations. We have a double-prefixed word here ("in" in the negative sense; "ad" meaning towards) and the root "verto," meaning to "turn." When President Clinton said in THAT famous deposition, when Ken Starr's vicious prosecutor asked him detailed questions of his sex life, "I advert to my statement," he meant that one should "turn to" his written statement for his response to the question. But inadvertent, from the beginning, referred to people who didn't adequately "turn to" things, that is people who were not properly attentive or observing. Inadvertent people are heedless or inattentive. From 1681: "If we are not wilfully deaf and inadvertent to it." From 1863: "Inadvertent critics object to God being described as speaking..." Or, to paraphrase John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, "I, being inadvertent, plunged straight into the Slough of Despond."

I think you get my point. Now, on to inane.

1177