Now if this sort of zetetic meandering has any appeal, I figure you’ll dig my book as well. This post generated a long thread of facebook comments, all of them leaping into the fray of the climate change argument and in no way examining (or inquiring) how that knee-jerk affiliation to Flat Earthers constitutes an outright pejoration (the process of a word becoming, over time, an inversion to the negative of the original meaning). Yesterday’s flat Earthers are today’s climate change denialists.” “Samuel Rowbotham (a flat Earther), wrote a book in 1881 called Zetetic Astronomy: Earth Not a Globe. So like, if you’re a seeker, it helps to be winged! Of course – because then you can fly over the terrain like a raptor, seeking small creatures, eyes inquiring, zeroing in on logical hideouts…īut consider how devalued zetetic has become, and what happened when the esteemed Anu Garg, of fame, added an historical tidbit to the definition of zetetic: And look what I found in the last line of the definition: “ probably akin to Sanskrit diyate, he flies, he soars“. When confronted with a word that time has forgotten or the internet just doesn’t care a fig about aside from a few short definitions (did I really use that metonym twice? and what is it about figs? I mean I love figs but…), I head to my Webster’s Third International (and yes, I am not a true linguist just an amateur, but don’t forget that amateur is a word whose origins are rooted in love). But this is where zetetic comes in as a more specific and special word whose value is not provided easily by its two most common definitions.
It is when the word seek is linked with the word wisdom that we start to get zetetic to seek wisdom well, one definitely needs to do a lot of inquiring. And one can seek ( ’seeking solitude’ or ‘seeking fame’, ‘seeking employment’) yet none of these would be a zetetic enterprise because inquiry is not an integral element of that search. You see, one can inquire without truly ‘seeking’ (as in ‘he inquired after her mother, but she knew he didn’t really give a fig’). Now consider that zetetic’s current definition found online (inquiring or seeking) seems greatly reduced from its early connotations, and that the two different activities it contains are, in our word zetetic, interconnected. (To further confuse, there is another version of the Greek verb often cited as the root – zetein.) Sadly, the verb lingers now only in academic or biblical circles. According to an online journal called Zeteo, that I discovered after drilling through further Google pages, the verb may be translated as: to challenge, to question, to seek honestly, to dispute, to debate and pose alternative ideas and solutions. A transliteration of a Greek verb (ζητέω), it is used liberally in classical Greek philosophy as well as in the New Testament. It is a wonderful and evocative word, yet somehow its soft, noble voice was overwhelmed by the clamor and din of the industrial age.īut let’s start at the beginning, which is the root word zeteo (now pronounced zeh-TAY-o).
Take zetetic – a word which is listed as extant circa 1640, presumably having been plucked from the Greek by an unknown inkhorn. But in the aftermath, history becomes littered with the corpses of countless words that did not deserve to die. (Not to worry, the general theme of Her Argument is Play, in all its marvelous incarnations!)īut the reason I write about it here is that the word raises a question – How do words vanish from the lexicon? Times change of course, civilization theoretically progresses, individuals supposedly progress along with it. Zetetic : inquiring or seeking… The word then became key to a whole chapter On Being Zetetic, in my upcoming book Her Argument.
Me too… until I stumbled across the adjective when searching through online dictionaries for a term related to what I do a lot of.
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