Vital resource, or is it just for putting
on airs? Photograph: Graham Turner
Russian gas or British booze? Our topical etymologist Sean Clarke couldn't decide which to write about, but since they turned out to be the same stuff, he didn't have to ...
What to do this week? Gas, I thought to myself, reading about the ongoing ding-dong between Russia and the Ukraine. Or perhaps drink, to go with poor Charles Kennedy.
Gas. Now there's a puzzling word. On the one hand, it is impeccably Anglo-Saxon, both grammatically and semantically. What could be more native than a word that refers both to fun and flatulence?
And yet on the other hand, it also forms suspiciously latinate words. Not just in English (gasiform, gasify, gasiferous) but in other languages, such as gaseosa, the Spanish for sugared soda water (what we laughably call lemonade). Could it be that rarity, an English word loaned to Latin? So I looked it up, and it turns out the actual derivation is almost comically apt: Collins tells me it was coined by JB van Helmont, a Flemish scientist, on the basis of the Greek word χαος - chaos.
Now Helmont, a good renaissance thinker, wasn't referrring to the Latin loan, meaning disorder, but the Greek original, meaning emptiness, void. It's instructive, in some ways, how our attitude to invisible substances changes. Before we appreciated there was more than one invisible substance, and that they had different qualities, there was little reason to distinguish all the space (another meaning of Greek χαος) in which nothing was. Later, these noxious airs would become so important we would go to war over them.
I was suddenly, at this point, reminded of another type of air, which etymology suggests we've always had a great respect for, the air that emerges from our own mouths - and not only we journalists. Spirit, for instance, comes from the Latin spiritus, meaning breath (think of re-spire). Indeed, another Latin word for soul, anima, which can also mean breath, is also closely related to a range of Greek words meaning "wind" or "breath". Take Genesis 1:2 (from the King James Version): "and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters". That word "Spirit" in the old Greek Septuagint translation is "pneuma" (think of pneumatic) and in Saint Jerome's street Latin translation is "spiritus" - breath.
I had, of course, to look up the word "soul". Chambers Etymological Dictionary (CED) tells me there are "no cognates outside Germanic", and that the best guess as to its derivation is a Proto-Germanic form "saiwalo", meaning "coming from the sea". The suggestion being that in some distant past, while our cousins and forefathers in the Mediterranean basin thought that our soul resided in our breath, our cousins and forefathers in the forests of Germany thought that it came from out the sea. Don't ask me.
But in any case, here I suddenly was, back in front of the word "spirit", whose plural of course means strong drink. It was no good. Though I might choose not to look into the drink topic to spare Charlie's feelings, it hit me nonetheless.
The link, in fact, is a strong one. Just as those words for "breath" in Latin and Greek often have the extended meaning of "life", so there is an abiding (maybe ironic) association between words for distilled drinks and life: eau de vie in French, uisge beatha in Irish and Scottish Gaelic, both meaning "water of life" and both apparently loan translations of a medieval Latin term.
We owe the discovery of spirits to Muslim scientists who invented the still, a contraption which takes the vapours - the spirits - from alcoholic and other liquids and purifies them. We owe the word "alcohol" to Arabic, in which, saith the CED, it means kohl, the metallic substance used as eyeshadow (from the use of distillation as a way to purify it).
And all of this from the strange dedication of the learned men of Islam to discover ever stronger alcoholic concentrations from which to abstain, at a time when Islamic civilisation far excelled that of western Europe. Lessons, perhaps, for Mr Kennedy.
Lastly, and to complete the circle, we should consider the most important chemical in alcoholic drinks, ethanol, whose name comes from ether, derived from a Greek word meaning "the heavens, the upper air".
