Developing a super-power

One of the most interesting aspects of travel, when you look at it from the right point of view, is how humbling it can be. When you come to think about it, every country, every society, every family you visit has their own way of facing life, they have customs, dishes they cook, stories they tell, jobs they do, and every one of the myriad combinations is a perfectly valid "solution" to the problem of "how to live one's life". Undoubtedly some of these solutions require more effort than others; some take place in a harsh environment, while other people are greatly pampered. In the end, all of them get to live another day (and those who do not, at least they tried) which makes your own solution probably valid for you but not necessary better or worse than anybody else's.

A secondary effect of the exposure to different customs is that, to an open mind, they are opportunities for improvement. There a certain risk of falling pray to the fallacy of "the grass is greener on the other side of the fence" and embracing summarily some foreign customs just by its exoticism, but taking the effort of comparing your own uses with someone else's in a critical way can certainly produce useful conclusions. And when these exchanges happen at the level of the society, the culture evolves, adapting patterns from their neighbors or lending them their own.

Photo: Dan Diffendale

Languages, as elements of our cultures, show a similar pattern: even if the sound of Xhosa or Vietnamese languages (to name a couple of examples) is startling or even completely alien, the fact is that they are used daily by millions of speakers to talk to the family and friends, conduct business, write love letters, express their dreams and aspirations. As with cultures, every language is a valid "solution" to the problem of communication, and each one is adapted to the past and present circumstances that the body of its speakers has experienced. But the most interesting part for me is precisely the past, because every word has a history, a series of steps of how it came to be used in its present form, either derived from other term or imported from a different language, suffering phonetic or orthographic alterations: it is what we call its etymology.

In the case of English language, the bulk of the vocabulary is a mixture or Germanic, Scandinavian and French terms, which makes the etymological research quite arduous, forcing us to consider all the three (or more) possible origins and the reasonable changes that a word could have undergone until today. However, in the case of technical and scientific terms, due to the fact that most of the scientific treaties were still written in Latin almost until the turn of the 18th century, there is a wide dominance of words of Latin and Greek origin. This restricted ancestry makes the etymology of scientific words much easier to trace, also because they have circulated mostly among cultivated people and in written form, so their chances for misinterpretation (a.k.a. corruption) were relatively small even across centuries. And being able to infer the etymology of a word is tantamount to a super-power, because it enables you to understand it, or at least to have an educated guess of what it could mean, even if you have never heard it before.

A couple of weeks ago I was discussing with Karen the horrible concept of eugenics, the intention to "improve" the human race/species by selective breeding, particularly with the advancement of genetic technologies that could eventually make it possible for the parents to choose among several fertilized eggs or even improve them to exclude not only congenital diseases but also other undesirable treats. I made the point that this kind of selection would almost unavoidably lead to a significant reduction in the genetic diversity of humanity, which could ultimately mean our demise at the hands of a particularly vicious disease. The etymology of eugenics is clear from the Greek roots "eu" (good) and "genus" (growth) but then I wondered if there would be a similar word to represent the fact that this kind of breeding would be counterproductive. I remembered that "cacophony" is also a word of Greek origin which means literally "bad sound", so I decided check if anyone had mentioned before the term "cacogenics" in this sense and I was pleasantly surprised that it was the case. Karen and I laughed at the fact that someone (probably a lot of people) had taking a similar line of thought that we believed to be original...

The other rewarding surprise of the etymology super-power came about over the weekend, as Jason was studying the chemistry of photosynthesis for his biology class. In the production of nutrients from the solar energy plants need a number of chemical reactions where the products of one become the reagents of the next one. This allows the absorption of the solar energy bit by bit (so that the plant does not burn with the heat) but makes the chemistry rather complicated, and Jason was struggling with remembering what came first, plastoquinone or plastocyanin. I have to admit that this is beyond my depth already, but I noticed that the latter contained the word cyan, which is also Greek for "blue" so I pointed it out to him, and suddenly it all made sense: the photosynthesis first take some green light for one of the early steps and then some blue light for the late steps, so there was a strong hint that the plastocyanin could come after the plastoquinone. In a matter of minutes he confirmed the hunch and thanked me for the hint, which he will never forget.

The story today is purely anecdotal and does not mean by any stretch that etymology always has the right answer, but if you pay attention to the words and their history it is not infrequent to find interesting hints and curious developments. I can only confess my love for words in almost any form and bear witness to the amount of pleasure that I have extracted from them over the years. I would be delighted if my sons would share a bit into this passion. Have a nice evening.