Immaculate: Easy to say, hard to live up to
An unedifying tale of etymological convenience and religious confusion
I’ve said more than once in this newsletter that religion does weird things to a young mind. What I haven’t said is that it also does weird things to a not-so-young one. The older I get, the more grumpy I am about the whole business, and the grumpier I get about it, the grumpier I get with myself for getting increasingly grumpy about it. Can’t I just think about happy things like well-aged Bordeaux blends, growing vegetables and Jordie Barrett landing that penalty that would have won us the last Rugby World Cup?
Apparently not.
One of the central tenets of the Catholic religion - which is better than most at messing with developing minds - is that the Virgin Mary was unstained by original sin thanks to what we were told was the Immaculate Conception. Note the definite article and capitals, both of which make clear that this was a one-off event that you should under no circumstances try at home.
To my young mind, this piece of dogma and the later news that Mary fell pregnant while a virgin became inextricably linked. Not only was her conception immaculate, but so was the means by which she brought her son into the world. Thus it was that to my young mind, any non-virgin birth (even though I had no idea what that involved exactly) was, at the very least, suspect and, at worst, likely to be sinful and more than a little grubby.
None of this struck me as odd until I was in my late teens. One unfortunate side effect was that it also led me in a bizarre, disconnected way to suppose that conception was generally a chaste affair with none of the thrusting, grunting and embarrassing nudity that I only later learned was involved.
My innocence wasn’t helped by my older brother, who one night explained the business to me in terms that our parish priest would surely have approved of. When a man and woman love each other, he told me both cryptically and selectively, a seed passes between them and is implanted in her body, where it grows into a baby. I imagined a couple (married, of course) sitting on a park bench of an evening in front of a still lake beneath a star-studded sky, holding hands and thinking beautiful thoughts about each other, whereupon a seed magically emerged from his body (from exactly where was a question that didn’t occur to me) and floated gossamer-like upon the cool breeze to her trembling womb.
When a school friend later insisted that the affair was a little more mechanical than that, I insisted with equal certainty (and no small amount of horror) that if someone believed in something with sufficient strength then that thing could indeed happen. “You get pregnant your way,” I thought to myself, “and us believers in the one true faith will get pregnant ours.”
Despite its religious connection, the word immaculate didn’t enter the English language until the mid-1400s. It’s from the Latin immaculatus, which means “unstained”. Immaculatus is formed from the prefix in- (“not, opposite of”) and maculatus, which could also mean “defiled”.
In- is a decidedly handy prefix. You can whack it in front of almost any adjective you like and you’ve got something close to that word’s opposite or, at the very least, a word that signals the absence of whatever the non-prefixed word signifies.
You may also be asking what it’s doing spelt im- and not in- in immaculate. It’s spelt that way because you and I, my friend, are lazy. Try saying inmaculate and compare that with immaculate. Didn’t that extra effort almost kill you? Of course it did.
Our ancestors, bless them, relieved us of a great deal of effort by deciding that for the sake of our poor, overworked speech organs, in- could also become im-, il- or ir-, depending on what followed. Hence immaculate, illicit and irreplaceable, each of which is inmaculate, inlicit and inreplaceable in thinly veiled disguise.
You may also be asking “what about un-? Is that, too, a variant of in- developed for reasons of convenience?”
Not exactly. Un- is an Old English prefix inherited from Proto-Germanic. Etymonline calls it “the most prolific of English prefixes” before stating that it underwent a “mass extinction” in early Middle English before making a late-career comeback in the 1500s. These days it sometimes competes with the Latin in- for primacy. Did you feel a pull, however small, to say unreplaceable rather than irreplaceable earlier? If so, you’re in good company - and it would take a bolder person than me to say you’re wrong, either.
Im- as in immaculate should not be confused with the im- in words like implant, impoverish and impact. In those cases, the prefix acts as an intensifier, which is pretty much the opposite of what it’s doing in immaculate. To implant something is to not just pop it into wherever, but to do so in a way that will have it stay there. When you impoverish your ex by telling the authorities about their dirty business dealings and unpaid taxes, you can sit back knowing that miserable piece of trash is going to spend the rest of their life mouldering away in a seedy trailer park.
Why we would allow a prefix to perform two tasks that are diametrically opposed is an interesting question. I don’t propose to answer it here (see “you and I, my friend, are lazy”, above), but I will say that English is full of opposites (or contranyms) that cause us little, if any, problem in practice. Cleave can mean split or cling together. An apology can be a request for forgiveness or a defence of the same act. We also have words with multiple meanings such as bass (fish or type of sound), arm (sticky-out bit of your body or weapon), date (fruit, dinner plus optimism, day in the calendar), right (correct, direction) and so on. By a mixture of rote learning and context, we rarely get any of these things confused, which I have to say is remarkably clever of us and a good reason to take a collective bow.
Let it also be known that while my brother probably cast more confusion than light the night he tried to explain sex to me, he was an essential part of my getting through my teen years in one piece. Nine years older than me, he bravely shielded me from our father’s verbal abuse at some cost to himself. By the time he left home, I’d developed enough resilience to stand up for myself and entered adulthood more or less intact. Peter, on the other hand, spent many years dealing with his childhood experiences, where he’d had no older brother to protect him. From me to you, Peter, weird sex education lesson notwithstanding, no one could ask for a finer or braver brother.
Bits and specious
If you’ve always read Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” as a celebration of taking the path less travelled, this article may change your mind.
Quote of the week
I once wanted to become an atheist, but I gave up - they have no holidays.
Henny Youngman
Out here we is stoned - immaculate.