A good dictionary can paint a picture or point in a particular direction, but definitions are themselves made of words, so as we seek to find the definition of a word, we follow a path of synonyms into infinite regress. Having gained some appreciation for the wonder of words and their liveliness, I took up the pastime of searching for the roots of a word and contemplating the ideas and images that gave it birth. In English, the roots of many words can be found in Latin and Greek and in the language that most likely predated them, called Indo-European, the mother language also of Sanskrit, German, Russian and a variety of other languages. It is a mistake to look to etymology for the current meaning of a word, but it can show you a rich bank of associations and metaphors that reveal the marvelous ways in which disparate ideas link and interrelate. I used to sit for hours in the dictionary area of the library and pore over the volumes of Julius Pokorny s Indogermanic Etymological Dictionary, discovering, for example, that the Indo-European root sed, to sit, through various transformations over the millennia gave us sit, set, ersatz, settle, saddle, soot, seat, seance, sedentary, sediment, session, siege, assess, dissident, obsess, possess, preside, reside, subsidy, supersede, subside, sedate, soil, and chair.
Complexities boil down to simplicities.
Over the years, a few words have become favorites of mine, where the etymology can reveal something about the word that says even more than the word itself. In celebration of the subtle power that lies in words, I would like to share a few of these, all of them words that are virtues. The first is subtlety, which comes from the Latin subtilis, which originally meant the thread passing below the warp, the finest thread. Subtlety then is the kind of thread that is very hard to see but which nonetheless is vital to the integrity of the whole fabric. It s a beautiful image that speaks to why it s so important to pay attention to subtleties.