A GREEK WORD FOR IT

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 772, 7 May 1954, Page 5

A GREEK WORD FOR IT

Sir,-l1 wish to support P. Wiltshire in your April 15 issue, regarding the misinterpretation of words used by the ancient Greeks. It is nothing short of idiotic to take words straight from an ancient language and attribute to them meanings they have acquired only after centuries of development and specialisation. As Eric Partridge says in his World of Words, ", . . degeneration of meaning is a conspicuous phenomenon in semantics." What did the two Greek

words in question mean originally? Politics are the affairs of the "polis" or city. To understand it involves the whole question of what democracy was to the Greeks, of how the city was also their State which was actually governed by the people, for every citizen in it was a member of its Assembly. This literal form of democracy was possible only because their States were the size of what to us would be no more than fairly small towns. Under these circumstances it was natural and easy for every citizen to take an interest in the affairs of the State. Now for "idiotes" (hence idiot). Liddell and Scott’s lexicon says of this word "a private person, one in private station -an individual-one who has no professional knowledge-(also) an_ ill-in-formed, commonplace person." It comes from "idios," "one’s own-personal, pri-vate-peculiar, separate, distinct, hence strange." The Greek idiot then was merely a private person who might be ill-informed but not necessarily so. It may be that the word was used by the Greeks to denote one who took no interest in the affairs of the State, but I have not been able to confirm this. If they did it would certainly not be in the modern sense of the term, but merely designate someone who lived to himself. The distinction would be merely that between private and public. pOnly by long development has one of ‘the minor meanings of "idiotes" come to be the main meaning and that meaning itself developed and exaggerated out of all proportion to its original significance. To return to the original quotation: as the bases of the argument haye been shown to be unsound, what of its conclusions? The same situation no longer holds. We cannot all take an active part in politics, though it is natural for one himself so interested to think that we should. Likewise, in this scientific age we should all be interested in science: in this age of much music, via radio, etc., all interested in what passes for music, and so on. What walking encyclopaedias we would need to be if various people had their way!

C. FRANCIS

THOMPSON

(Christchurch).

(Abridged. Ed. )