I remember a friend telling me, many decades ago, to think of the events in our lives as moving in a circle.
When we’re at the bottom of the circle (I imagined it as a clock face, so let’s say the bottom is six o’clock) and we feel totally pessimistic, it’s actually time to feel optimistic because things can only pick up and get better.
By the time we’ve climbed to nine in that circular clock face, we feel as if, finally, life is starting to look good again. And it keeps getting better.
By the time we’ve reached 12, we feel on top of the world. We are joyful, confident, ready to take on all challenges. We’ve reached the pinnacle of optimism.
We are so buoyant with confidence that we’re not overly worried that we’ll inevitably be sliding down the other side of the clock, ever closer to that pinnacle of pessimism, six o’clock. But then, right after six, we’re on the upward curve of the circle once more.
I’m not sure where we are on that ‘clock face of life’ right now, but I suspect we haven’t yet come to six o’clock. Still, we’ll get there eventually, I just hope it won’t take years before we can begin to feel optimistic again.
Trump dominates the news, of course. The main stories in our Canadian news right now are about the trade war that he launched against our country, imposing 25 per cent tariffs on certain exports.
The word tariff, from the Italian tariffa, came into English from the jargon of medieval trade in the Mediterranean area.
But to begin with, it had two senses in English – it referred to a table of multiplication, a ready reckoner, and at the same time to an official list of customs duties to be applied to imports and exports, which is the sense it still has today.
Most appropriately, the medieval language of trade is also the source of another couple of the words that we come across in press reports about Trump’s recent declarations.
One headline reads “Trump accused of using AI to compose garbled executive orders”. Garble entered English in the early 15th century, based on the Italian garbellare, meaning to sift.
As a noun it signified the chaff and dirt that traders would find mixed with spices, which had to be sifted out. The verb to garble described the process of cleaning the spices of the extraneous material.
By the late 17th century, a garbler referred to someone who garbles or mutilates literary works, statements, etcetera. Trump is that kind of garbler.
Another word that pops up repeatedly is average, with reference to the effect Trump’s policies will have on the average American family: “Analysis Finds Trump Tariffs Will Cost Average US Family $1,600 or More Per Year”.
Origin of the word is uncertain, but like the Italian avaria, by the late 15th century it was used in the language of Mediterranean maritime trade to refer to small charges above freight costs. Its transferred sense as a medium amount is documented from the 18th century on.
Reference is often made to Trump’s distortion of the facts. The word distortion can be found in English by the 1580s. Based on the Latin distorquere, to twist apart, it signified to twist the true meaning of something.
As Trump treats other nations with what they consider unfairness, they become increasingly defiant and vow to retaliate in kind.
Defiant came into English by way of Old French from the medieval Latin diffidare, to mistrust.
Chaucer used it in 1386 to mean disavow. Retaliate has its source in the Latin retaliare, to pay back in kind. Originally the reference was to acts of kindness or civility, but by the 1630s something had changed and henceforth it referred to injury or ill-treatment.
While waiting for the ‘clock face of life’ to plunge to rock bottom, I’ll be scanning the headlines to see what other loaded words Trump’s magnetic personality attracts.
Sabine Eiche is a local writer and art historian with a PhD from Princeton University. Her passions are writing for children and protecting nature. Her columns deal with a broad range of topics and often include etymology in order to shed extra light on the subject.
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