When etymology becomes poetry – 09/06/2023 – Sérgio Rodrigues

There’s a secret inside every desk, a star at the center of disasters, a Christian in every asshole, a Croatian stamped on every tie and the landing of a bird in the heart of pensions – the same bird that, evident to the point of being invisible, lives on the plane.

Yes, etymology, the “study of true meaning,” which is dedicated to mapping the origin of words, shares a long and beautiful frontier with the best poetry. Like this one, it is capable of extracting from language some crazy illuminations that go beyond prosaic rationality, lightning bolts of beauty in its most remote provinces.

By exposing the new words and meanings that metaphor and metonymy, those perpetual engines of language, have been weaving and unfolding throughout history, etymology may not even explain today’s complicated world very well – but who does?

As Jorge Luis Borges famously stated –and ironically–, knowing that the word calculus comes from the Latin “calculus” (pebble), since the first calculations were made with the help of pebbles and pebbles, “does not allow us to master the arcana of algebra”. That’s true, but the Argentine genius, who was passionate about etymology, knew well that it had other uses.

Why should we keep secret the kinship, via Latin, of secretaries and secretaries with the secrets that, managing someone’s professional and sometimes even personal life, they need to know how to keep?

Wouldn’t it be disastrous to omit from the origin of the disaster the “disaster”, the “bad star” that, coming from Italian, spread to other languages ​​from the end of the Middle Ages, aboard the popular belief –still very much alive, by the way– in influence of celestial bodies on what happens on Earth?

Of course, it would be silly to try to stifle the historical fact that the word cretin was born in a dialect of the Swiss Alps as “crétin”, which simply meant Christian – not out of religious prejudice, but out of compassion, to emphasize the humanity of those who suffered from depression disorders. development due to thyroid dysfunction that medicine came to call cretinism.

It may be that a grave spirit dismisses it as a mere prop of useless culture to know that Croatian mercenaries in the service of France in the 17th and 18th centuries, with their strips of cloth tied around their necks, made such a strong impression on Parisians that they gave rise to a new and lasting fashion, turning “hrvat” (Croatian) into “cravate” (tie).

Even so, I don’t intend to retire –or even take a break– before boasting that these words share with the landing of birds and the resting of humans the ancestral Latin “pausa” (interruption, cessation, rest). And look at the little bird: the pose we strike in front of the camera, immobilized for a second, is not far behind.

Speaking of a bird, which resembles a bird (hail, Mário Quintana!), it remains to be explained that the plane is, in origin, a large bird, an “avion”, a word that the French inventor Clément Ader coined in 1875 to patent his flying contraption .

That first “avion” never took off, and only 31 years later, also in France, Santos Dumont would take the 14-bis off the ground. If this testifies against Ader as an aviator, the fact remains that his word took off to glory, immune even to the very heavy anti-aircraft artillery that, in the early years of the 20th century, tried to translate it in Portugal as “avejão”.

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