Fire and Knowledge

Every now and then a word comes to mean its opposite meaning. It is called catachresis (from the Greek ‘misuse’). Bill Bryson, in The Mother Tongue: English & How It Got That Way, says this about it:

Counterfeit once meant a legitimate copy. Brave once implied cowardice–as indeed bravado still does. (Both come from the same source as depraved.) Crafty, now a disparaging term, originally was a word of praise, while enthusiasm which is now a word of praise, was once a term of mild abuse. Zeal has lost its original pejorative sense, but zealot curiously has not. Garble once meant to sort out, not to mix up. A harlot was once a boy, and a girl in Chaucer’s day was any young person, whether male or female. Manufacture, from the Latin root for hand, once signified something made by hand; it now means virtually the opposite…. Simon Potter notes that when James II first saw St. Paul’s Cathedral he called it amusing, awful, and artificial, and meant that it was pleasing to look at, deserving of awe, and full of skillful artifice….

A word that shows just how wide-ranging these changes can be is nice, which was first recorded in 1290 with the meaning of stupid and foolish. Seventy-five years later Chaucer was using it to mean lascivious and wanton. Then at various times over the next 400 years it came to mean extravagant, elegant, strange, slothful, unmanly, luxurious, modest, slight, precise, thin, shy, discriminating, dainty, and — by 1769 — pleasant and agreeable. The meaning shifted so frequently and radically that it is now impossible to tell in what sense it was intended… (pp. 77-78)

A man sunk in grief suffers every chance comer to stir and augment his affliction, like a running sore; and by reason of the fingering and consequent irritation it hardens into a serious and intractable evil.

–Plutarch (A.D. 46?–c. 120), “Consolation to His Wife” in The Art of the Personal Essay by Phillip Lopate (1994), p. 20

Wendell Berry in The Nation:

Alice Waters has asked me if I will propose one thing that could change the way Americans think about food. I will nominate two: hunger and knowledge.

Hunger causes people to think about food, as everybody knows. But in the present world this thinking is shallow. If you wish to solve the problem of hunger, and if you have money, you buy whatever food you like. For many years there has always been an abundance of food to buy and of money to buy it with, and so we have learned to take it for granted. Few of us have considered the possibility that someday we might go with money to buy food and find little or none to buy. And yet most of our food is now produced by industrial agriculture, which has proved to be immensely productive, but at the cost of destroying the means of production. It is enormously destructive of farmland, farm communities and farmers. It wastes soil, water, energy and life. It is highly centralized, genetically impoverished and dependent on cheap fossil fuels, on long-distance hauling and on consumers’ ignorance. Its characteristic byproducts are erosion, pollution and financial despair. This is an agriculture with a short future.

Knowledge, a lot more knowledge in the minds of a lot more people, will be required to secure a long future for agriculture. Knowing how to grow food leads to food. Knowing how to grow food in the best ways leads to a dependable supply of food for a long time. At present our society and economy do not encourage or respect the best ways of food production. This is owing to the ignorance that is endemic to our society and economy. Most of our people, who have become notorious for the bulk of their food consumption, in fact know little about food and nothing about agriculture. Despite this ignorance, in which our politicians and intellectuals participate fully, some urban consumers are venturing into an authentic knowledge of food and food production, and they are demanding better food and, necessarily, better farming. When this demand grows large enough, our use of agricultural lands will change for the better. Under the best conditions, our land and farm population being so depleted, this change cannot come quickly. Whether or not it can come soon enough to avert hunger proportionate to our present ignorance, I do not know.

In the loss of [Jefferson’s agrarian vision], or of such a vision, and in the abandonment of that possibility, we have created a society characterized by degrading urban poverty and an equally degrading affluence—a society of undisciplined abundance, which is to say a society of waste.

–Wendell Berry, “Discipline and Hope” in A Continuous Harmony (1972), p. 101

Adverting befuddles our experience, not because advertisers are liars, but precisely because they are not. Advertising fogs our daily lives less from its peculiar lies than from its peculiar truths.

–Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961), p. 213

Wickedness is fickle and changes frequently, not for something better but for something different.

—Seneca (ca. 4 BC–AD 65), “Slaves” in The Art of the Personal Essay by Phillip Lopate (1994), p. 15