Ubiety and repletive ubeity

I am not yet ready to return to the list of words in the Collegiate. I am still trying to get over ubiety/ubeity. I think I am coming up with a theory of the development of English as I think of ubeity. The word ubeity in fact does not appear either in the Collegiate or the OED. Ubiety, however, goes back to the 17th century. "To make a body in this sense independent of Place or Ubiety, is as unconceivable as to make it independent of Time." My point is that the 17th century saw the beginning of modern philosophical speculation in England. You never hear of a 16th century English philosopher, but by the time you reach th 17th century, you have all kinds of brilliant minds (Hobbes, Locke, etc.). Hm. Why is that true? Is it only because we today find the 17th century philosophically useful for us, even though there might have been people just as smart, prolific and insightful philosophically in the 16th (or 15th, for that matter) centuries in England?

Well, getting to my linguistic point. The word ubiety became useful as English and Scottish philosophers began to think about place and time, but when that subject became uninteresting philosophically, the word kind of dropped out of usage. Indeed, by the middle of the 19th century, ubiety could be used in a rather seamy context: "Vervain (i.e., verbena) and magic haschisch, which endows Thought with ubiety."

Philosophical Backlash

However, the philosophers didn't give up. The philosophical usage of ubiety continued throughout the 19th century. The Century has a long descriptive paragraph on ubiety, the first sentence of which says, "Ubiety is generally said to be either repletive, circumscriptive, or definitive." Don't you just love the way that 19th century philosophers (and this kind of definition and classification HAS to come from the late 19th century, even though the Century doesn't tell us when it appeared) divided the world? Their political counterparts were dividing the world in the 1870s and 1880s; why shouldn't they try to slice the intellectual realms similarly? But just as the colonial efforts of the politicians ended up in 20th century disasters, so the philosophical divisions of words ended up being ignored and mercifully buried. Unfortunately, with political divisions you can't simply "bury" the people. They often have to bury each other, and not amicably.

But let's think about this philosophical attempt to divide ubiety one more minute. Before I want to divide anything, I want to be pretty sure what it is I am dividing. But, isn't that the fundamental problem? What, essentially, is ubiety? The act of being somewhere or the state of being in a definite place. What really does that mean? Why do you need a word to describe being in a definite place? Or, if you need a word, why isn't "here" good enough? Well, I think the scholars were too embarrassed by the simple word "here," and they had to develop a much more complex term, ubiety, which someone developed into ubeity and thus they had their own little universe. Now they could use the word ubeity or ubiety and probably get tenure. But this wasn't enough. Someone had to come along and make a murky concept even darker, and so they invented repletive, circumscriptive and definitive ubiety. Even the Century, that dictionary that SO wants to place all human knowledge on a secure and scientific basis, says, "but these terms are taken in different senses by different authors." Of course they are! They are taken differently because no one knows what he is talking about. It is as if someone is trying to describe what light is like in a darkened cave.

But let's play with these folks for a little more before we bury them unmercifully. "According to the best usage," as the Century unctuously informs us, "repletive ubiety" is that of a body which excludes other bodies from its place by its absolute impenetrability. Sort of like preemptive federal legislation, I guess, or legislation in which Congress "occupies the field," as lawyers say it. But this is a sort of preemptiveness in the spatial arena. I suppose repletive ubiety is a sort of 2000-pound elephant who sits whereever it wants and excludes every other living thing from its "Sitzplatz," unless, however, you want to get crushed. Well, the concept is clear enough, though probably philosophically and practically useless.

Continuing with Ubiety

Let's go on. Then you have circumscriptive ubiety which, according to the Century, is "that of any extended image which is in a place part by part without exlucing other objects"--i.e., like occupying a seat on a bus with someone sitting next to you. Finally, we have definitive ubiety, which is "in connection with a portion of space, all in every part, and not part by part." What is THAT supposed to mean? I am sure that philosophers could have given papers to each other at conferences for years on this stuff, and they would have been entertained, even if no one knew what was going on. But, isn't that a little bit of the purpose of specialized vocabularies? To keep other "poachers" off your property so that no one can really see how little you know, how lazy you are and how little of what you do passes for any kind of contribution to anything? Why not just have the courage to admit, the XXXX to acknowledge, that little of what you do, if anything, contributes to the advancement of anything? I think that such an admission is just too scary for people. It might make them wonder why indeed they are living. So, let's keep up the illustion of various kinds of ubieties; let's have unclear words without end about murky subjects; let's celebrate it and publish it and recognize it. For, if we don't, we might have to face us to some stark realities about the human condition.

Well, that sure felt good! Now, let's move on a little further in the Century and then safely return to the Collegiate.

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