You Could Look It Up (14 page)

He probably began his
Etymologiae
sometime around the year 617, and he was certainly at work on it by 622. Isidore kept at it until his death in 636, when it was completed, edited, and published by his
student Braulion. The Latin is simple, making the book accessible even to those who were not well educated, and the range of subjects it covered is positively dizzying. It collects useful knowledge from 154 authors and assembles it into a twenty-book compendium covering grammar, mathematics, medicine, languages, geography, zoology, agriculture, and, above all, religious life. Isidore has been called “a bright light in an age which for a number of reasons has been called dark.”
16

Working from the assumption that knowledge of words leads to knowledge of things, Isidore explored the world by looking deep into the origins of words. This approach is visible in the opening section of the
Etymologies
, where he discusses the words
discipline
and
art
, relating them to the words for
learning
,
full
,
knowledge
,
strict
, and
virtue
:

Discipline and art (De disciplina et arte) 1. A discipline (
disciplina
) takes its name from “learning” (
discere
), whence it can also be called “knowledge” (
scientia
). Now “know” (
scire
) is named from “learn” (
discere
), because none of us knows unless we have learned. A discipline is so named in another way, because “the full thing is learned” (
discitur plena
). 2. And an art (
ars
, gen.
artis
) is so called because it consists of strict (
artus
) precepts and rules. Others say this word is derived by the Greeks from the word
ἀρετ
[
arete
], that is, “virtue,” as they termed knowledge.
17

As it happens,
art
does not come from
arete
, and even if it did, the etymology would not fix the meaning of anything. This is an example of what linguists call the “etymological fallacy,” the idea that the “true” meaning of a word is somehow lurking in its origins rather than in the way it is used by people in the real world. As Isidore himself put it, “The knowledge of a word’s etymology often has an indispensable usefulness for interpreting the word, for when you have seen whence a word has originated, you understand its force more quickly. Indeed, one’s insight into anything is clearer when its etymology is known.” For Isidore, though, etymologies were the key to hidden knowledge. So, for instance, the word
medicina
(medicine) was supposed by Isidore to come from
modus
(moderation), because “nature grieves at excess and rejoices at restraint. Hence those who drink potions and remedies copiously and
unceasingly are troubled. Anything that is immoderate brings not health but danger.”
18
The word
medicine
itself therefore teaches us a valuable medical lesson.

This etymology, alas, is bunk. Although both
medicine
and
moderation
come ultimately from the same Indo-European root,
*med-
‘to take appropriate measures’, they took very different routes to get there, changing their meanings over the millennia, and neither comes from the other. Besides,
*med-
is also the root of
modest
,
meditate
,
mode
,
modern
, and
gamete
. No one today would make the argument that modernity, modesty, and meditation have some secret connection. But for Isidore, this is where wisdom was to be found. It led him to speculate about words’ histories, with superficial similarities between words serving to link them together. In his discussion of “tiny flying animals,” for instance, he explained that “Bees (
apis
) are so named either because they cling to each other with their feet (
pes
), or because they are born without feet (cf.
a-
, ‘without’), for they develop feet and wings afterwards.”
19
The effect is a text richly stocked with seeming puns, but the puns are more than casual wordplay; they are intended to give us a profound insight into the truth—a poet’s understanding of the universe.

Even when Isidore’s facts are not supported by modern scholarship, the
Etymologies
offers a fascinating glimpse of the way people saw the world in the seventh century. Isidore loved classification, as with warfare: “There are four kinds of war: just, unjust, civil, and more than civil,” or literary works: “There are three genres of ‘literary works’ (
opusculum
). The first kind are extracts (
excerptum
), which in Greek are called
scholia
… The second kind are homilies (
homilia
), which Latin speakers call ‘talks’ (
verbum
) … Third are tomes (
tomus
), which we call books or volumes.”
20
Sometimes his taxonomic urge got out of hand, as in this riot of Latin kinship terms:

The originator of my birth is my father, and I am his son or daughter. The father of my father is my grandfather (
avis
), and I am his grandson (
nepos
) or granddaughter (
neptis
). The grandfather of my father is my great-grandfather (
proavus
), and I am his great-grandson (
pronepos
) or -daughter (
proneptis
). The great-grandfather of my
father is my great-great-grandfather (
abavus
) and I am his great-great-grandson (
abnepos
) or -daughter (
abneptis
). The great-great-grandfather of my father is my great-great-great-grandfather (
atavus
), and I am his great-great-great-grandson (
adnepos
) or -daughter (
adneptis
). The great-great-great-grandfather of my father is my great-great-great-great-grandfather (
tritavus
), and I am his great-great-great-great-grandson (
trinepos
) or -daughter (
trineptis
).
21

Little original research informs the
Etymologies
. As the modern editors put it, Isidore’s “aims were not novelty but authority, not originality but accessibility, not augmenting but preserving and transmitting knowledge”; the work as a whole is “complacently derivative.” He drew extensively on the greatest Latin stylists, including Virgil, Cicero, and Lucan, as well as the Bible, which he cites more than two hundred times. But evidence suggests he did not even read all the authors he cited, copying them instead at second hand. Still, few books had anything like Isidore’s influence on the intellectual life of the Middle Ages: “It would be hard to overestimate the influence of the
Etymologies
on medieval European culture,” write his modern editors, “and impossible to describe it fully. Nearly a thousand manuscript copies survive, a truly huge number.”
22
Every medieval library with any intellectual pretensions owned a copy, and the greatest authors of the Middle Ages—Bede, John Gower, William Langland, Geoffrey Chaucer—quoted him. Even as the manuscript age came to an end, the
Etymologies
remained a central text. It was printed as early as 1472, in the very dawn of movable type, and went through ten more printings before 1500.

Isidore was canonized as a saint in 1598 and named a Doctor of the Church in 1722. He remains an inspirational force today, and in a way that would make the encyclopedist proud. In 1997, Pope John Paul II proposed Isidore as the patron saint of the Internet, and the Order of Saint Isidore of Seville is working to make it official.

Even before the development of a type of book called an encyclopedia, there were writings that were unambiguously encyclopedic—concerned with capturing all the essential knowledge in the world and collecting it
in one place. Cassiodorus and Isidore were engaged in comparable projects around the same time, as the old pagan intellectual order was collapsing and a new Christian one coming into being. As late antiquity shaded into the period later called the Dark Ages, these reference books did their part to keep the lights on.

CHAPTER
5 ½

THE DICTIONARY GETS ITS DAY IN COURT

We call books “influential” all the time. To see real influence exerted by a book, though, look to the reference shelf. Reference books may well have saved some lives and sent others to the gallows.

The United States has a long history of deferring to dictionaries in interpreting the U.S. Constitution. A federal “Dictionary Act”—1 U.S. Code §1—governs the interpretation of statutes (“words importing the singular include and apply to several persons, parties, or things; words importing the plural include the singular; words importing the masculine gender include the feminine as well …”), and legal theorists who espouse originalism and textualism are especially quick to turn to dictionaries. Because the Constitution was written in the 1780s, two dictionaries have been favorites for those who would argue over troublesome terms: Samuel Johnson's
Dictionary
, published in 1755 and revised in 1773 (see chapter 10), and Noah Webster's
American Dictionary
, published in 1828 (see chapter 16).

As early as 1785 the U.S. Supreme Court referred to Johnson's
Dictionary
, and it keeps coming back to it, including in some high-profile cases. The committee responsible for drawing up impeachment charges against Richard Nixon turned to Johnson for a definition of
crime
, and Johnson's definition of
war
was introduced into the proceedings of a suit challenging Bill Clinton's authority to order air strikes in Yugoslavia. When the Court argued over whether the Constitution mandates the census takers to count every individual or allows them to use a combination of sampling and statistical methods, the Justices looked up the Constitution's word
enumerate
in Johnson. In
Eldred v. Ashcroft
, on the constitutionality of the Copyright Term Extension Act,
a plaintiff argued that the extension of copyright terms went beyond the “limited” terms called for in the Constitution. Justice Ginsburg ruled against him, writing for the majority, “The word ‘limited' … does not convey a meaning so constricted. At the time of the Framing, that word meant what it means today,” and she attributed her definitions to one “S. Johnson.”

But the recourse to dictionaries is not limited to Johnson and Webster. Definitions of
confinement
from
Webster's Third New International
and the
Oxford English Dictionary
featured in legal arguments over John Hinckley's request to leave a mental hospital in 1999 after his attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan,
1
and words like
prevent
,
delay
, and
report
in statutes routinely send lawyers, judges, and scholars to dictionaries. Chief Justice John Roberts cited five dictionaries in one legal opinion, including the definition of the word
of
.
2
An opinion by Justice Breyer in 2013 lets loose a tsunami of dictionary citations: