Etymology from Memory, #’s 8 and 9

As the World Turns. Plus, Onomastics!

My Sanskrit lessons have taken me away from you, loyal reader, even as they nourish me with so much more that I would like to share. If you guessed that by “sharing” I had in mind some old-fashioned speculation on certain common features of the Indo-European Weltbild as revealed by the study of cognate word forms, you were exactly right. I have been thinking in particular of a few semantic clusters lying at the heart of what we now think of as ‘philosophy’, and occuring in several languages across Eurasia in connection with the description of the natural world and of our experience of it.

One of them, which I will only mention briefly this time, has to do with the apparently very deep connection between that most profound philosophical topic, time, and that most banal and unphilosophical topic, weather. As all French-speakers know, the word used for both of these is the same; if you speak Romanian, moreover, you will know that both of the most common words for weather --the Slavic-rooted vremea and the Latin-rooted timpul (a cognate of temps)-- mean ‘time’. But why? And how would we know, in coming across, for the first time, the title of the French translation of Heidegger's Being and Time, that this is not a tome about existence and meteorology, respectively? I suspect that the modern concept of time in fact emerged out of an ancient, purely qualitative experience of the passing of days and nights through sundry climatic states: dew melting, morning fog clearing, rain clouds coming, and so on. That's just what time was. Why the modern notion of time would come to be elevated among the loftiest of philosophical topics, while weather would be degraded into a topic for common folk with nothing else to talk about, will, again, have to be a question for another, um, time. (I seem to recall a fantastic essay on just this topic by that Columbia anthropologist whose name is escaping me. The one who wrote the book about the devil in Latin America, and the other one about cocaine... oh wait, I remember: Michael Taussig.)

What I really wanted to talk about is the tiny little lexeme, vṛt, which occurs in a number of fascinatingly various words of a number of Indo-Iranian and Slavic languages. In the form just given, it is the stem for a Sanskrit verb that means, in the most straightforward sense, ‘to turn’, but also, and more often, means ‘to be’ or ‘to exist’ (I won't dwell on the difference between these. It is not clear to me which of these meanings in turn gives rise to the noun vṛttānta, which means ‘news’ or ‘tiding’, a notion that in the pre-CNN era seems to have been fairly close to what Wittgenstein would have called alles, was der Fall ist: everything that is the case. Now I will be very ashamed if I am mistaken and my Sanskrit professor happens to read this, but I am fairly sure that it is the same root that occurs, in altered form in the word varṣam, which means ‘year’, a length of time which the ancient Indian astronomers certainly knew involved a sort of turning. I am certain, anyway, that it is this same root that occurs in the Russian verbs vorotit’sya (‘to turn around’), prevratit’sya (‘to turn into’), vozvratit’sya (‘to turn around’), and so on; as well as in the Russian noun vorota (‘gates’, as in, ‘gates to the walled city’), along with its more concise Western Slavic variants, such as the Serbian vrata.

So existence, news, the passage of the seasons, passage from the outside to the inside, or vice versa, are all covered, from Ayodhya to Belgrade, by the same little root. Now of course a lexeme is not a concept, and an etymologist must never suppose that cognate words in different languages got to be that way because they mean just the same thing. It is also possible that they result from misunderstanding. But still, it is striking, is it not, how easy it is for us to understand why these different words in these different languages belong together? After all, what was As the World Turns (which apparently aired for the last time just two weeks ago, having first appeared in 1956!) about if not life itself, and what did it do if not bring tidings to the couch-ridden millions, tidings by which they might set their daily rhythms, pass the day? (The fact that soap operas are operas, and opera are deeds and thus apparently conceptually quite distinct from tidings, will also have to be a subject for another occasion).

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But I also wanted to say a few words about a word that ought to be close to my heart, but is not. In fact, each time I hear it it strikes me as among the most foreign, most impossible sounds ever to have reached my ears. I have in mind my own first name. ‘Justin’. How the hell could I be Justin? I mean, how the hell could I be Justin? You know what I mean. I mean it's not just that it doesn't fit me, it's that it bears no possible relationship to me at all. It has nothing to do with me.

And the really tragic thing is that I picked it. I named myself. A living testimony to the danger of laissez-faire parenting, when I was eight years old or so, I got it into my head that I would like to take one of my two middle names, and turn it into my first name, which until that point had been ‘Erik’. My parents did not object, though my grandparents thought it the height of frivolity, and for the rest of their lives could not break the habit of calling me by the name I was given at birth.

In 1980, I associated the name ‘Justin’ with a certain very respected brand of cowboy boots, which in turn, by some sort of synaesthesia I really can't explain, I associated with chile con carne and with pick-up trucks. These were good associations, and my mind was made up. A year or so later I decided I would very much like to be named ‘Stanley’. I was allowed to use a toothbrush with that name on it, but if I recall correctly I was told that a person can only change their name once, and that I would have to stick with ‘Justin’. If only I had waited! I could have had a vaguely Jewish- or Polish- or Lithuanian-sounding name, an immigrant name, something that suggests the milieux in which I would later come to feel so much more at home.

Of course, ‘Justin’ would not go on principally connoting Western footwear. In 1980, most of the Justins who have ever lived were not yet born, and the statistics available from the Social Security Administration on the relative frequency of the name confirm what was already obvious to me: that I am as a father to the Timberlakes of this world, and a grandfather of all the little Biebers. Today, ‘Justin’ is a hopelessly juvenile name. It peaked in 1991, after I'd already been stuck with it for 11 years. Add to that another eight turns around the world since I was born as ‘Erik’, and you will see that I am a very old Justin indeed, a fossil Justin, an Urjustin.

I take some consolation in the fact that as an American, to paraphrase Bruce Willis’s character in Pulp Fiction, my name doesn't mean shit. Certainly, it doesn't mean anything in the way that ‘time’ or ‘weather’ or ‘vorota’ mean something. But it does mean something as a measure of the onomastic possibilities of the time and place from which I come. After reading James Davidson's surprisingly fantastic review of the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names, Vol. V, A: Coastal Asia Minor, Pontos to Ionia in the recent London Review, I was struck by the extent to which my taken name (I can’t really call it a ‘given’ name) issues from that wild efflorescence of naming practices in the post-John-Joseph-and-James era. My name, like Neville and Geoffrey, is a somewhat later result of the broad pattern of naming that accompanied the definitive rise of bourgeois individualism, a rise paralelled by the more familiar appearance of conspicuous consumption. By naming myself, I brought this pattern of individualism to its logical extreme.

At least, as I try to keep in mind, my name, unlike made-up monikers such as ‘Keeley’ or ‘Jayden’, in fact has a history, and a distinguished one at that. This is particularly evident in that part of the world that traces its lineage back to Byzantium. When I was married in the Romanian Orthodox church, the priest had the decency to call me by my saint’s name, with the proper Greek pronunciation: Ιουστίν. This made me feel like I was part of something (certainly not the Orthodox Christian church, but at least a tradition where my name means something besides rodeos and the dregs of N’Sync). It was also vastly preferable to what I had heard during my earlier sojourns in Russia: in a feeble attempt to capture the English pronunciation of my name, Russian officials insist on transliterating it into Cyrillic as Джастин, rather than simply looking into their own history and finding the saint name Юстин, a figure no less important in Russia than in Romania. I always thought that while ‘Iustin’ was noble and distinguished, with the addition of an -ov suffix ‘Dzhastin’ would be the perfect name for some gruff warlord in the Caucasus. I hated that transliteration so much it made me decide not to pursue a Ph.D. in Slavic linguistics, and to study philosophy instead. 

But who was this figure who became such an important saint in the Orthodox church, and who gave me a glimpse of the possible dignity of my otherwise indefensible name? He was, as you might know, St. Justin Martyr, an early convert to Christianity who was eaten by lions in Rome in 165 CE. St. Justin is best known for his conviction that he did not have to give up his prior philosophical convictions --Platonistic, as it happens-- in order to follow Christ. He is said to have died wearing the philosopher's gown, which other new believers insisted on shedding after their conversion.

What does this have to do with me? Nothing at all. As I've said, my name doesn't mean shit, and what little it does mean comes from boyhood fantasies of cowboydom long since abandoned. There were no saints at all in my childhood, let alone a system of onomastics governed by the calendar of saint days. But as mistakes go, I could have done worse. I could have named myself after Justin's feeble-minded co-martyr --Marcus, let us call him-- who was so pleased to feel like part of something that he stripped off his handsome philosopher’s robe and ran to the lions naked.

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Comments

[B]

You should have asked the Russians to call you "Justas," which raises all kinds of great connotations of WW2 and spy movies.

Anyway, to me vreme as weather and time suggests a deeply rooted understanding of the transitoriness of all things. Danas vreme je lose-the times are bad today, or the weather is bad today, but tomorrow it will be good again, and the next day back to bad. For the Yugoslavs, the vreme is always different but always comes around.m Russia, in this case, exists in a timeless loop of shitty climate, both physical and political.

[Stephen Menn]

Not just Indo-Iranian and Slavic, also Latin "vertor" is cognate. Can't immediately think of Greek or Germanic cognates--I think "werden" is cognate with "vardhate" rather than "vartate." But, like you, I'm going just by what I can reconstruct from memory.

[Justin Smith]

I had thought about 'vertor', but wasn't sure and didn't want to jump to any conclusions. With this as a cognate, of course we also get 'vertical', 'versus', and I think also the French 'vers' (the preposition, that is, not the noun for 'verse', let alone the plural of the noun for 'worm'), which makes this an even more fascinating cluster of cognates than I initially thought.

[Stephen Menn]

Actually, verse too; at least, I remember the standard story being that prose is "prorsum," continues straight forward in the same direction, whereas verse is "versum," turning around at the end of each line to start the next, maybe something like plowing a field. French "ver" = Latin "vermis" is, however, another can of worms.

[Erik Warrior]

Names can be tricky things indeed. Does a name have to have meaning for a person to be be able to assume ownership of it? Worse yet, if you are given a name that means something, should you be expected to grow into that name? What kind of a world would we live in if we were made to live up to the meanings of our names? As it is, names seem to have in a large way, lost their meaning in our society. Although it is somewhat freeing in a regard, it's somewhat sad as well.

Oddly enough, I've never quite grown into my middle name, which coincidentally enough, is Stanley. It is the name of my paternal grandfather, but I hardly knew the man. I am, however, rather comfortable with my given name, Erik. I've always liked the viking connotations. Somehow, that 'k' seems more manly than using the 'c', and the constant mixups between the two are well worth putting up with.