`Accosting Infinity'

I’ve known two readers, both in pre-Internet days, who were so scrupulous about tracking down allusions and following leads in footnotes that they seldom finished reading any book they started. Both read copiously, but in self-canceling spirals; deeply, not broadly. Scrupulosity turned into paralysis, a page into a volume, many volumes. I still sympathize with their plight, for a good reader is never passive, but I try prudently to balance knowledge and pleasure. Either pursued heedlessly ends in the loss of both. Borges might have turned this into a fiendish little fiction. In his preface to The Secret Lives of Words, Paul West considers a cousin of the obsessive allusion-chaser – the reader in the grips of compulsive etymologizing:

“I sometimes regale myself with an image of the hell-bent reader not content with tracking the words being read who stretches out to the etymology of the words in the definitions the etymology provides, and then to the etymology of those words, and so endlessly on, accosting infinity as if it were a parlor game.”

I endured several spells of root-digging when I was younger and my Latin was better, in the heady days when I learned new words in my first language by way of my second – celerity, remonstrance, spelunking, sylvan, lacuna. Words were dense with history. Nothing we could say was arbitrary or unconnected, if looked at intently enough. Language was never inert but bubbled with humanity, if only you had ears to hear it. Here’s West again:

“The sensation of knowing more, as miscellaneous knowledge fans out over an ever-wider area, relating your slips of the tongue to the human verbal enterprise at large, is stupendous, the kind of noble aggrandizement the great Victorians Pater, Arnold, and Ruskin said came from attachment to a great religion, or indeed any body of major thought. Chronic connectedness while babbling in the current idiom sums its up.”

Like a truly dedicated wordman, West even includes “etymology unknown” among the words whose genealogy he explores:

“Alas that this only too frequently appearing phrase’s initial letters spell EU, Greek for `pleasant,’ `agreeable.’ To be wholly confounded amid the golden terminal moraine of word history, with weird slackenings all around, as well as absurd twists and gross misunderstandings, is harsh. To come up blank only reminds us that we are lucky to know anything at all.”

While getting a haircut Saturday morning I remembered Karl Shapiro’s “Haircut,” especially this stanza:

“Scissors and comb are mowing my hair into neatness,
Now pruning my ears, now smoothing my neck like a plain;
In the harvest of hair and the chaff of powdery sweetness
My snow-covered slopes grow dark with the wooly rain.”

No exotic words there, but I tried futilely to summon the etymology of scissors, sensing it was French. I checked, and it was, ultimately from the Latin caedere, “to cut.” What have I gained by learning this? Not much but the satisfaction of having solved another minor mystery, and a renewed sense of wonder for words, our birthright as humans. West again:

“In truth, many of the words whose etymology we know turn out to be rather dull (word, for instance), quite without vicissitudes or bizarre shifts; it is then, perhaps in a mood of grateful resignation, that we marvel at any word’s very creation amid all the other noises of the planet, forever wondering why that sound, those vowels and consonants?”



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