Exploring derivatives is a useful tool when learning vocabulary. Yet the connection between the meaning of modern English and the Latin root-word is not always obvious, not least because the usage and commonplace meaning of words can change – sometimes dramatically – over time. Take the example of the Latin adjective clarus, -a, -um, from which we get words like “clarity” and “clarification”. The Latin word did indeed mean “clear” or “bright”, but students are often puzzled by its (if anything more common) meaning of “famous”. But when you think about it, something which is “clear” or “bright” is something which is “easily seen” or “very visible” – hence the word also came to mean “famous”. I find it useful to remind students of English words which carry both a literal and metaphorical meaning: for example, the word “heavy” has the most obvious meaning of an item weighing a great deal, but it can also mean “serious” as in “this is a bit of a heavy subject to be discussing at the dinner table.” It’s useful then to point out that the Latin adjective gravis, -is, -e (from which we get the word “grave”) had this same double meaning, thus it can be translated as “heavy” or “serious”.
My husband and I spent this weekend with a friend who lives in Bristol, and what a fine city it is. If you have any interest in engineering, it’s a bit of a pilgrimage site. Isambard Kingdom Brunel is profoundly connected to the city through his ground-breaking engineering, the work of which left an indelible mark on Bristol’s landscape and infrastructure. Perhaps most visually striking is the Clifton suspension bridge, but he also designed and built Bristol Temple Meads railway station and the SS Great Britain, a steamship which is now preserved in the city’s harbour. Finally, and perhaps most significantly in terms of the city’s outreach, Brunel led the construction of the Great Western Railway, which linked Bristol to London and thus shaped the city’s relationship with the rest of the UK.
Yet Bristol’s engineering feats do not begin and end with Brunel. Bristol has a long and prestigious history as a centre for aircraft design and manufacturing. Perhaps most excitingly of all, the city was instrumental in the design of Concorde, and all ten British-built Concordes were manufactured and assembled at the Filton site in the north of the city. The first British prototype made its maiden flight from Filton and her last journey also ended at Filton, where the aircraft is now displayed at the Bristol Aerospace museum. We visited her in her very own hangar and were thrilled to discover that one can climb inside the fuselage and peer into the cockpit, a rare privilege indeed.
Being prone to labyrinthine thinking when my mind is full of new experiences, I found myself pondering what one might consider to be man’s greatest inventions. My husband would argue, without a shadow of a doubt, that man’s greatest feat of engineering is Concorde. To have designed an aircraft that can travel at a height and speed achieved hitherto only by fighter jets, in which the pilots wear oxygen masks and pressure-suits, and to make that aircraft comfortable enough and the ride smooth enough that the wealthy passengers who swan on board the flight will not spill a drop of their champagne, is a truly mind-blowing achievement. It was wonderful to read the accounts of the pilots who flew this magnificent machine, and one of them sticks in my mind in particular. He said various things about what an extraordinary experience it was to fly the Concorde, but he finished with: “the novelty never wears off.” I love the idea of a pilot simply loving the experience of flying this phenomenal jet, every single time he did so.
Despite my genuine love of Concorde and the engineering innovation and brilliance it signifies, my own candidates for the greatest inventions by man tend to be more prosaic. In this I am influenced by my father, himself an engineer, who used to torture interview candidates with this question. While they floundered in their attempts to come up with the most exciting modern leaps of nano-technology, my father would push them to consider man’s earliest achievements, the ones that defined us as a species different from all others, for better or for worse. The invention of the bow and arrow; the discovery that cooking food with fire not only made it more palatable but released more nutrients; the building of the rafts that enabled us to leave the land mass of Africa, Asia and Europe; the innovations of the ramp, the lever and the wheel, which enabled us to harness unimaginable power and move objects many times our own size and weight; the building of bridges, with which we find ourselves back with Brunel. As I wandered around Bristol, I found myself pondering all of these things, as we blundered in and out of the city’s quite bewildering array of coffee shops and hipster bars.
My brain then looped back around to the very meaning of the word “invention” and thus we are back to etymology. Students are often puzzled as to why the main derivative of the Latin word invenire, which they are taught means “to find”, is “invention”, when an invention is surely an innovation, not a discovery. The Latin verb primarily meant “to discover”, “to find” or “to come upon” but also “to invent” or “to devise”. It is created out of the preposition “in” and the verb “come” so it literally meant “to come into”. I am no philologist, but I have found myself pondering whether this comes down to the ancient beliefs about knowledge and discovery. For a civilisation that pioneered so many ideas and inventions which we now take for granted, the ancient thinkers didn’t actually set much store by innovation and originality. Plato believed that every single human is born with all the scientific and mathematical knowledge that exists in the universe, they simply need to have it uncovered for them via the Socratic method. Likewise, in the arts, novelty and innovation was not particularly valued in the way that it is today. People wanted to see imitation and mimicry: the artistry was in re-telling good stories with great effect, not in making up new ones.
All of this means that, in the ancient world, even those who made the most remarkable leaps of invention, merely saw themselves as uncovering already-existing truths. There is a humility to this that I believe we should cherish. Newton famously said, “if I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”. He believed that his scientific discoveries were made possible by the knowledge and work of his predecessors, those very pioneers in the ancient world. I think there is something rather beautiful about the fact that those giants would have said the same thing about themselves.
