Counterpane I

This essay shows you what happens when you just ask an innocent question about what a word means. Such innocent questions take you into the most interesting journeys of knowledge and understanding. It makes you realize that you have been living your life heedless of all the meaning teeming around you. In fact, I think that revolutions in understanding happen not because you ask a convoluted or "difficult" question but because you just as a very simple question, a question that could be posed by a five year-old, about a simple visible phenomenon right in front of you. I think the reason we don't uncover meaning in the universe is because we become too wrapped up in our "sophisticated" understanding of things, so much so that we are afraid to join into the thinking process attendant upon asking very simple questions.

An Illustration from Last Night's Spelling Bee

One of the words in an early round of the Portland Spelling Bee last night (I sat this one out; I was still tasting my victory of 7/9) was counterpane. A counterpane is a bedspread or coverlet. A woman around 60 got the word and, since this is the kind of word traditionally in "women's knowledge," she got it right. But as I was sitting and thinking about the word, I said to myself, "Why should counterpane mean bedspread?" There seemed to be nothing in the word that pointed to bedspread. Thus, I needed to do some mining of the word in order to put this small segment of my world together. It is my equivalent of what many people do with their lawns--they remove all the leaves, trim every blade of grass, cut back every rose, make sure no dirt is on the driveway, etc. So I am cleaning my intellectual furniture this morning by discovering what counterpane means.

But, as usually happens with me, on the way to "meet" counterpane, I discover a whole new world. Join me, please.

Counterpane

I looked it up in the OED, and here is where the fun began. The fun began because I made a mistake. Ah, the second lesson in life. If the first is that revolutions come by asking simple questions, the second is that knowledge comes through making mistakes. My father used to get mad at me when I made mistakes. I can still hear his voice slicing through me when I made a calculation error or a reasoning error in geometry, for example. But my father was wrong to get mad at me for my mistakes, even if they were repeated mistakes. He should have commended me, given me an award for my mistakes, because he should have realized that mistakes are the gateway to deeper, firmer and more worthwhile knowledge.

Here was my "mistake." I looked up counterpane, and I didn't realize that there were two separate entries for the word. So, I looked up the first, and the definition was from law: "the counterpart of an indenture." All of a sudden a surge of energy flowed through me. I knew I had to get to the bottom of this. How can a counterpart to an indenture, whatever that was, be the same word for a bedspread? I suppose if you did a Google search on that question, that you would get no results. One might say that this is because the question is inherently uninteresting or a waste of time. But what is a waste of time? What does "inherent" mean? The only person who uses the word "inherent" in our culture these days is George W. Bush to describe powers that he thinks he has from the "unwritten" text of the Constitution to spy on people and to act in opposition to Congress' wishes. George is enabled in this brutal understanding of "inherent" (i.e., the powers of the Presidency) by his incompetent, fawning and obsequious Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales.

Indenture

All right. So that is the question that triggered my thinking. What does a bedspread have to do with an indenture? Well, let's begin with law and then move to the bed(spread, that is). Before knowing what a "counterpart of an indenture" is, I suppose we should first know what an indenture is. In law an indenture is "a deed between two or parties with mutual covenants, executed in two or more copies, all having their tops or edges correspondingly indented or serrated for identification and security." Now we are getting somewhere, but we will have to wait for a second to get to "serrated" or "indented." Thus, an indenture is in fact nothing more than a written contract or an agreement where easy identification and security is the important criterion.

But look at the word. Indenture has to do with teeth, doesn't it? Sure enough, it does. So, what does an agreement in law have to do with teeth? Well, it is pretty simple. Originally, as the OED tells us, when a contract was signed or a check was issued (more in the next essay on "check"), it was done in two (sometimes three) copies. One would go to each party. But this was before carbon copies, so the contract/security had to be written twice. It was written twice on the same sheet of paper or parchment. Then, the paper was cut or "serrated" in a "sinuous line" so that when the pieces were brought together at any time, the two edges exactly met and showed that they were parts of an original document. Thus, we get the phrase a "pair of indentures."

So, now it is clear. The word indenture referred either to the document or the serrations or "tooth-marks" that separated the two copies of the document. Thus, we have the indenture and its counterpane. Thus, from 1548, there is the following quotation: "The duke of Aumerle..had his counterpaine of the endenture of the confederacie..in his bosom."

Well, as the Wicked Witch of the West said, the fun is just beginning. Let's continue our journey to try to get to the bedspread.

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