Organization

At the outset, the purpose of this post was going to be to inform folks about the Pennsylvania seminars. But I ended up deep in language (surprise!).

Here’s what happened: I started thinking that I really should reorganize this website (I need my own website, I know, I know), and I should have a page just for announcements, and a different page for language investigations. That got me to thinking about the word organize, and I was off and running. So my excuse for not having an organized website (yet) is that this post is both: an announcement and an investigation.

Putting together two weekend seminars out of state is no mean feat. It takes a lot of organization. The Friday spelling seminar is $75, payable to Stratford Friends School, and the Saturday-Sunday etymology seminar is $225 ($250 with lunches), payable to LEX. Folks who sign up for both get $25 off the weekend seminar. So, you know, it’s complicated bookkeeping, which is so not one of my great loves. I can do it, and I do it fine, but I don’t love it. On top of that, there’s hotel information for those traveling in ($124/night includes shuttle service, so no rental car needed). Please contact me for more information or registration flyers. I’m sorry it’s cumbersome — one of the things I plan to have better organized in the future, along with the website.

Thinking about the word organize, I started to wonder whether <org> or <organ> is the base element, and whether it’s related to <erg>, a free base element that denotes ‘work’. I was thinking of the word cyborg, a 20th-century neologism coined from “the first elements of cybernetic and organism” (The Online Etymology Dictionary — the only unadulterated OED). Sure enough, I see that <organ> and <erg> are indeed etymologically related — both courtesy of Greek via Latin. I have some evidence that <org> is a base element, but that’s a story for another time.  Suffice it to say that I’m satisfied for the time being with the following understanding:

<organ> is a stem meaning “instrument” — literally, denotationally, “that with which one works” (Etymonline, and elsewhere). Now if only I could get my website and my LEX life more finely tuned!

This word family — organize, organization, organic, organism, organ — is etymologically related to the base <erg> (‘work’) and its family of energy, allergen, ergonomic, ergative (look it up! I promise you will learn something). Also related etymologically: urge, surgeon, and — you guessed it — work!

Now, this investigation took me some (shocking!) places I didn’t expect to go, and it also took me back to some places I’ve been before, thus deepening my understanding of those previous journeys (one with surgeon was particularly rich) and whetting my appetite for others. One of the things I have to work out along the path of my investigation is how I know when I’ve got a morpheme and what’s simply, as one well-known morphologist likes to call it, “etymological residue.”

How can we tell? No resource will tell us reliably what the orthographic base element of a word is; this is something we have to discern by an organic process. So what does that process look like, and how do we know when we’ve ventured away from morphology, and entered into etymological markings and connections rather than morphological analysis? Well, as it so happens, this is a central question of my current work. I have a sense of how this works, but my present academic research and writing are targeting  these questions explicitly. This is the work I will be sharing, in its latest form, at these weekend conferences in Pennsylvania.

Recently, I was conversing with a dear friend and adviser about the purposes of my work, my audience, my goals. It’s great when people who are invested in me and my work question me, because it makes me organize my thoughts and put energy into capturing them in text. What I realized is that, while I might be allergic to bookkeeping and organizational details, I have a sense of urgency about my real work, my language work. Here’s the best I could articulate to my friend, “I just do it, like an artist or a writer, because I can’t not do it. Because there are stories to be told, even though not everyone wants to hear them.”

There are more stories about these words and so many others. I am so looking forward to sharing them here and in the March seminars (don’t forget — there’s one in the Chicago area March 9-10 too!). If you’d like to hear more, come and join us, or think about working with LEX to set up your own local workshop.

3 Comments

  1. Old Grouch says:

    John Ayto concludes his explanation of ‘organ’ thus:

    The derivative ‘organize’ … originally denoted literally ‘furnish with organs so as to form a living being,’ and hence ‘provide with a co-ordinated structure’.

    And that is exactly what you are doing. You are a veritable demiurge working for all of us who are devoted to bringing light to an orthographically benighted world.

  2. Pete Bowers says:

    When I get the notice of a new post to LEX in my mailbox, I rarely jump right to it, because I know that I want to wait until I can make time to savour the read. This morning I reserved your post to accompany a leisurely morning coffee. Your hard work is always a generative treat, so it’s worth organizing my life to make the most of it. As ever, this post is worth the effort!

    A couple of points you made encapsulated experiences I so often have when investigating words, but which I despite many tries, I have yet to communicate effectively. (By the way, “experience” is a word worth investigating!). Here’s one that I wanted to highlight…

    “…this investigation took me some… places I didn’t expect to go, and it also took me back to some places I’ve been before, thus deepening my understanding of those previous journeys … and whetting my appetite for others.”

    I’ve tried to express this dynamic of learning by studying spelling in many ways before, but it always feels clumsy. With a few elegant words you have communicated what I think are three distinct but interrelated processes of any rich scientific inquiry. In this case we just happen to be talking about scientific inquiry of spelling. The process you describe of following the trail of the investigation to understand the spelling of a specific word:

    (a) leads to surprising learning about unanticipated words,
    (b) reinforces and deepens understanding of already familiar words and orthographic concepts, and
    (c) stokes the fires of further quests for understanding by shining a light on previously unconsidered questions spelling questions.

    This dynamic is so powerful because, once begun, it becomes a virtuous cycle of learning. As someone who spends much of his time introducing teachers to this new way of thinking about spelling, it also represents one of my biggest challenges. When I work with teachers or tutors who new to the concepts of spelling that fuel this type of investigation, they ask what seems on the surface to be a totally reasonable question. “Where do I start?” To those who have yet to start, it is hard to see that the the best answer I can come up with is, “start with a word that interests your students or yourself.”

    Perhaps it sounds like a copout or some sort of “flaky progressive education” idea. But in the end there simply is no starting point to a web of interconnected facts. There are foundational ideas that need to be addressed early on, but there is no principled reason to say that the first lesson should be about homophones, or morphology, or etymology or etymology or phonology. The way for a teacher to start is to have access to resources that accurately represent the spelling system (e.g., http://www.realspelling) learn some new facts about spelling and then start to investigate with their students. But who can believe that without having had the experience of learning about words in this way?

    Well, I’m seeing more and more teachers do just that. I just worked at a school where I was ran 6 days of workshops working with teachers, students and parents. On the first day I gave a 1.5 hour workshop to teachers. One of those teachers stayed after talking with a colleague and then with me. She didn’t hesitate to tell me that she had been very skeptical about this before my session, but that she was starting to get intrigued because she saw that there was logic to spelling that she had not previously seen. One and a half hours was enough to have an experience of this cycle of learning. Unbeknownst to me, she resolved to start her next class simply by asking her students to ask a question about a spelling and see where it went. The word that popped up was “experience” and the question was, “Why doesn’t it end with an ?”
    Jessica, the Grade 3 teacher had just learned about the fact that complete English words are not allowed to look like a plural if it is not, so she had at least a start of an answer to that question. And then she and her class filled her white board with the data of the spelling of words and kept noticing new ideas. When I saw Jessica the next day she was ecstatic with the response of the kids and the open ended learning they started just by asking a question with the assumption that there must be an answer out there to find.

    Was there any way to predict that this spelling concept and the word “experience” was the “right place to start”? Of course not. The right place to start was by investigating a question of a student and having the courage to start the virtual cycle that you have described like this:

    “…this investigation took me some… places I didn’t expect to go, and it also took me back to some places I’ve been before, thus deepening my understanding of those previous journeys … and whetting my appetite for others.”

  3. […] As I sit here a little shivery here in the Tokyo Narita airport ( on my way to an etymological Word-Fest that I bet involved lists in the organization) I’m wondering why didn’t I pack better and plan […]

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