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.
