The Four Parts of This And Every Weekend
October 4, 2015I’ve lived my life wrong.
I could tell you that it was because I had to, and that might well be true. But precise justifying of that sort is not what interests me here at the far end of rectitude.
I choose rather to begin again, walking uprightly even if my knuckles drag.
–The First Spill
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Time for a new book.
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spir- has many completely different derivations and meanings in English.
The spir- in spiral comes from the Greek speira “a winding, a coil, a twist, a wreath”
from PIE *sperieh-, from a base *sper- turn/twist/wind
(some interesting parallels there with ‘vertere (v.)’)
(“The Latin verb “vertere,” meaning ‘to turn,’ turns into several common and not-so-common words in English, such as ‘reverse’.”)
In the directly opposite sense, the spir- in spire, as a noun, descends straight up from
Old English spir “a sprout or shoot of a plant, spike, blade, tapering stalk of grass,”
from PIE *spei- “sharp point”
and thus, spire as a verb:
“to send up shoots, germinate, sprout,” as grain or seed”
“to extend to a height (in the manner of a spire), to rise aloft”
The Latin spir- means “breathe.”
Thus the blowhole of a whale is called its spiracle, the aperture through which she breathes.
When you have an in-spiration, an idea is breathed into (or perhaps within) your mind.
If you hold onto it, tight but not too tightly, the fleeting idea may tran-spire
… it may breathe-across from not being, into Being–that which we allege to be Reality.
That transpiring might need a con-spir-acy to help reify it–a breathing-together, while hatching a plot …
… or, you know, while breathing a belief in something together, such as the goodness of the American national experiment and Defending it with military force, the goodness (or badness) of the institutions of slavery or genocide or fascism (whatever that means), and alternative theories about who killed which president when. Or: lizard people, or: how and why Building Seven of the World Trade Center fell.
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Further down the evolutionary etymological ladder there is
Espíritu Santo
From espíritu (“spirit”) + santo (“holy” or saint[ed]).
see also “the Holy Ghost”
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And this is the ghostly connection that makes
that which
is sanctified.
Thus:
sanctuary (n.)
early 14c., seintuarie, sentwary, etc.,
“consecrated place, building set apart for holy worship; holy or sacred object,”
from Anglo-French sentuarie,
Old French saintuaire “sacred relic, holy thing; reliquary, sanctuary,”
from Late Latin sanctuarium “a sacred place, shrine”
(So sanctuary is a refuge–and also to provide refuge–and thus, earlier or later, a holy place …)
(Likewise: So a saintuaire is simultaneously a relic, and a container that holds a relic–which in this case also means: a house. Whether it moves
or whether it doesn’t.)
a sanctuary also simply means “one’s private room;”
and in Medieval Latin: “a church, a cemetery; a right of asylum“,(and also–to provide asylum, to give sanctuary) fr. Latin sanctus “holy” (see saint (n.).
Since the time of Constantine and by medieval Church law, fugitives or debtors enjoyed immunity from arrest and ordinary operations of the law in certain churches (and even in certain secular districts, biblically, and in London); hence its use by mid-14c. of churches or other holy places with a view to their inviolability.
The transferred sense of “immunity from punishment by virtue of having taken refuge in a church or similar building” is by early 15c., also of the right to such.
(Exceptions were made in England in cases of treason and sacrilege.)
The general (non-ecclesiastical) sense of “place of refuge or protection” is attested from 1560s;
as: “land set aside for wild plants or animals to breed and live”
it is recorded by 1879
in reference to the American bison.
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“Do you have a name for the new Book yet?”
No, not yet. The math hasn’t been done.
This was only determining what the different parts of the equation are.
One of them is buffalo.