No pain, no gain?
Even distinguished academics suffer on occasion from the Etymological
Fallacy, according to which they believe the current meanings and uses
of words can be illuminated -- perhaps even explained -- by their
etymological sources. Here are William Damon, Anne Colby, Kendall
Bronk, and Thomas Ehrlich on "Passion & mastery in balance: toward
good work in the professions", from
Daedalus,
summer 2005, p. 28-9:
All professionals must learn a
formidable array of skills, habits, and understandings to master their
fields. But beyond this, to accomplish good work consistently,
they must acquire a special orientation, a commitment to use their
mastery to fulfill a mission that goes beyond the self. It is the
pursuit of a mission that inspires passion. 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. Yet it
is satisfying in a way that routinized, fill-the-hours work is
not. Good work is always mindful of its mission; and passion,
whether painful or pleasurable, both energizes the mission and provides
and enduring emotional reward that goes beyond pleasure or pain.
It's been a while since we looked at appeals to etymology here at
Language Log Plaza, and the most recent discussion (you can start with
Mark
Liberman on hallucinate
and work back from there) was about appeals to
false etymologies. Damon et
al. are at least correctly tracking
passion
back to a Latin element meaning 'suffer' (though they have balled up
the details -- see below). Still, this appeal to etymology is a
very silly idea.
Etymology is fascinating, but the whole point with
passion (and many other words) is
that things have changed. If I tell you that modern English
head is directly descended from OE
heafod, which meant, well, 'head',
no flash of illumination will descend on you. Not much has
changed. But people get all excited about metaphorical and
metonymical changes, missing the crucial point, that in such non-
head-like cases, things really
aren't what they once were. Modern English
nice can be traced back to a word
meaning 'ignorant', and
silly
to a word meaning 'blessed, holy', but knowing that provides me with no
insight into modern English. Why should the historical connection
of
passion with suffering be
any different?
A digression on some of the etymological details... The relevant
Latin element is the verb root
pat-
(stem
pati:-) 'suffer pain',
whose present participle lies behind modern English
patient, both adjective and
noun. Both adjective and noun
patient
have lost the component of literal suffering, in the case of the noun
in favor of the sense 'one who undergoes, is affected by, an action' --
so that in semantics it now denotes a participant role in events (one
prototypically conveyed by direct objects, as in
I moved the box and
I admire Kim, but also sometimes by
subjects, as in
Kim got the Nobel
Prize and
Kim was given 500
dollars).
The past participle stem for
pat-
was
pass-, from which an
adjective stem
passiv- was
derived. This is the source of the modern English
passive, adjective and noun, both
of which maintain the 'undergo' sense of
pat-, but not the earlier 'suffer
pain' sense. Note that, like
patient,
passive has developed a
special grammatical sense -- for one type of construction, as in
Kim was given 500 dollars, in which
the subject denotes the, yes, patient participant in an event.
Now we're up to the Latin noun that is the ancestor of modern English
passion:
passio: (stem
passio:n-), built on
pass- with the
abstract-noun-deriving suffix -
io:n-
(still to be seen all over the place in modern English). (I don't
know where Damon et al. got their verb stem
passe, but they should have checked
the OED.)
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. It might be that love hurts, and
that "pursuing a noble mission is often painful", but insofar as these
claims are true, they're observations about the human condition, not
about the meanings or histories of words.
The persistence of the Etymological Fallacy among intellectuals is in
some ways deeply puzzling. When considering aspects of culture
other than language -- practices, customs, attitudes, beliefs, values,
and so on -- intellectuals tend to fix on things that have held
constant through history, things parallel to the English word for
'head'. Cultural historians, for instance, will tend to see
certain modern American attitudes as rooted in, and continuous with,
aspects of the early American experience, like beginning a new life in
a strange land and having an apparently limitless frontier to
settle. Isolated survivals are fascinating, but they are not
appealed to as ways of illuminating or explaining the present by the
past.
But when it comes to language, intellectuals incline towards a kind of
essentialism: words have an essential core of meaning (discoverable by
examining their histories), which persists through time. Possibly
what's going on here is that a lot of people are taking the connection
between words and their referents to be a natural, rather than a
conventional, one; there's a lot of word magic around. If so,
linguists have work to do getting out the news about the arbitrariness
of the sign.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at September 4, 2005 08:09 PM