or face the realization that your brain could also belong to some dude that's from berkeley and who sports a ponytail.
consider yourself warned!
nick has my brain.
Passion and Etymology
Disclaimer: I seem to be kind of harsh on linguistics lately. Please don’t think I have anything special against it, or against linguist bloggers. Some of my best friends, as the saying goes, are linguists who blog, and I adore Language Log. But….Arnold Zwicky at Language Log has an interesting post on the “etymological fallacy.” It involves a quotation in which someone talks about the historical connection between passion and suffering (in the context of encouraging people to differentiate what you’re passionate about from what you like):
This does not mean that pursuing a mission is always pleasurable: we do not agree with the pop psychology view that equates meaningful work with fun. Indeed, the etymological root of ‘passion’ is passe – or ‘to suffer.’ We are aware that pursuing a noble mission is often painful…
Zwicky replies:
The noun stem passio:n- originally would have meant ‘suffering’, and indeed passion is still used in this sense in the very specialized context of the sufferings of Jesus (The Passion of the Christ, passion play, etc.). But early on—the OED Online draft revision of 2005 lays out these changes in some detail—it developed not only an ‘undergoing’ sense (‘fact or condition of being acted upon’) parallel to that of patient and passive, a sense that seems to have gone out of fashion some 500 years ago, but also a separate extended sense, a generalization from experiencing pain to experiencing any sort of intense feeling or emotion, especially love or sexual desire (_His voice was husky with passion_), or, in another direction, enthusiasm or zeal (_a passion for astrology_), or, in still another direction, anger or rage (_a fit of passion_).
The result of all this semantic radiation, generalization, and specialization is that modern English passion has a variety of senses—among them, love or desire, enthusiasm or zeal, and anger or rage (all attested from the 16th century on)—that are not directly connected to one another and have nothing in particular to do with suffering.
Now, let’s begin by granting that we shouldn’t all suddenly stop using “passion” the way we did yesterday. It still gets to mean infatuation, and so forth, and it still gets to be used in “passion play,” and we don’t have to find a way for those two usages to be identical. This is what I take Zwicky to mean by “not directly connected.” But should we also suppose that there is no continuing interaction between these different meanings of the word? I don’t know about you, gentle reader, but understanding a tiny smidge about, say, early Christianity, has had a non-trivial impact on the way I use the word, the way I think about it, and the situations in which I would apply it, and I’m willing to guess I’m not the only person writing in the English language today for whom this is true. In that case, there’s really nothing at all wrong with someone pointing out that there’s a difference between passion and liking, or, even, referencing the etymology in the process.
Of course, one could come back with a claim that we’re all laboring under an etymological fallacy, and this is quite possibly the case, but it’s also a reality of how we really use the word. (And don’t we all know by now that wishful prescriptivism about how to use words in the face of how people really use words is a bad, bad thing perpetrated by bad, bad people? There’s a hole in my reasoning here, I know, and I’ll get back to you on that.)
There’s also, perhaps, a point to be made regarding the original expansion in meaning. Zwicky calls it “a generalization from experiencing pain to experiencing any sort of intense feeling or emotion,” which I’m sure is true, but I had the impression—and feel free to heap invective on me via comment or email if I’m wrong here, as my classical education is almost as inadequate as my linguistics education—that there was also an implicit connection, in the context of ancient psychology, between intensity itself and suffering—that at the heart of romantic love and other “passions” is already a kind of suffering or dis-ease. And even if I’m not historically grounded here, I think we can do some perennialist psychology and just say there really is such a connection, trans-historically, biotch. To quote Roy Orbison:
Love hurts
Love scars
Love wounds and mars
Any heart not tough
Or strong enough
To take a lot of pain
Take a lot of pain
If this is so, and if there was some intuitive connection at work in the original process by which “passion” acquired new meanings, what’s wrong with reminding people of the historical connection?
Note: To return to that earlier hole (orig. “whole”—Nicklexia strikes again) in my reasoning, I was conflating “possibly spurious claims regarding historical linguistics” with “usage”, i.e., suggesting that when someone makes a claim about, say, the meaning of a word, their claim is itself a real linguistic phenomenon which descriptivists are honor-bound to take seriously as such. In doing so, I probably overstate my case somewhat. Attacks by linguists on false or misapplied etymologies are more on the nature of sometimes excessive, sometimes justified, fact-checking by specialists.
But, in this case, it’s a little different from, say, bitching about how you can hear TIE fighters go by in Star Wars, where the obvious response is, “Yes, you’re right, but lighten up, man, it’s a space opera.” (Note: I’ve been on either side of that one plenty of times, so don’t think I’m innocent of nitpicking.) Or, more linguistically, the recent rant in Languagehat on NYT’s bad instruction on the pronunciation of “quipu,” which is wholly justified.
But spurious etymologies really are, sometimes, really part of how people really use language; it would obviously be insane to say either that (a) we must all use only correct etymologies, or (b) we must all never talk about etymology again. The etymological fallacy is, in a certain sense, just another linguistic phenomenon, even though it’s also an intrusion on the hallowed ground of linguistical expertise. Anyone who’s engaged in any kind of study of religion is familiar with the proliferation of spurious etymologies and place- and personal name etiologies; we don’t have records of language that go back too much farther than the sacred (and wildly unsound, etymology-wise) texts of the Judeo-Christian and Hindo-Buddhist worlds, (which were typically composed by the best-educated and most historically conscious members of their communities) so, while it may or may not be the case that “The persistence of the Etymological Fallacy among intellectuals is in some ways deeply puzzling,” it’s certainly not in the least surprising, and to say otherwise is to demonstrate a certain disregard for the history of intellectuals and ideas, as well as writing and, probably, speaking.
And while it’s become fashionable in some circles, especially on the internet, to bash the somewhat loose way of religious teachings with facts (obviously I’m not talking about Language Log here), the practice of enriching language with meaning through creative historical linguistics is probably indispensable to many sacred paths, and I would be hard-pressed to reject those paths, or the vitally important contributions they’ve made to human thought…(Though certainly I’ve been known to say some unkind things about translations of the Vajracchedika, known as the “Diamond Sutra” throughout much of history, including the present.)
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