In last week’s Lingwistics, I pretended to be not bothered by having to spend money on a set of hearing aids, rather than being able to use it for more wasteful purposes.
A few hours after hitting “Publish”, I found myself re-reading the newsletter and had one of those moments that every writer dreads. Why in God’s name did I choose that grey, bureaucratic word “wasteful” when the gorgeously dissolute “frivolous” was on offer? Adding to my remorse was that at no point during editing was I fully satisfied by “wasteful”. Somewhere in the back of my mind, a tiny voice kept whispering that a better word was available if only I would get off my arse and look.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
There, in a nutshell, are two pathetic truths about writers. The first is that nothing brings us greater pleasure than re-reading our own work. The second is that nothing causes us greater pain than re-reading our own work.
Regret is hardly the sole preserve of writers. That said, we do seem to have mastered the art of carrying it forlornly wherever we go, like those people you hear about who, having lost their passport in a foreign country, are doomed to wander - dragging their luggage behind them - through desolate airport departure lounges for the rest of eternity.
No one is quite sure where the word regret originated. It arrived in English in the late 14th century via Old French, but any earlier than that and the trail gets cold. One educated guess is that it may be related to the Old English graetan, “to weep”.
If that’s so, note the absence of the prefix re on that earlier version.
If it didn’t jump out at you at first, that’s because English doesn’t have a stem word gret - which it could have if graetan had found its way to us in a modernised form.
But Old French did have greter, to which it added re before bundling regreter off to England holus-bolus.
Most of the time, the re prefix signals a going back, doing something again. Hence tragic words like re-read, as well as countless untragic ones like return, repeat, replay, etc, etc. So pervasive is this sense that any time you see a familiar verb with re in front of it, you automatically assume something is happening for a second, third or morth* time. Not only that, but no one needs to check their dictionary to know that re + any verb at all constitutes a coherent English word.
Re has a long history, having served the same purpose in Latin that it does today, and thought by some etymologists to have originated in Proto-Indo-European as wret, a variation on wert, “to turn”.
But like so many aspects of English, things are not as simple as they might appear, and regret highlights this beautifully. If you regret something, that does not mean you are crying in your beer over it a second time. It just means you’re crying in your beer over it.
So what’s the re doing there?
It’s acting as an intensifier. In your high school English class, you might have learned that intensifiers are words that have little meaning themselves, but add force to another word. Very is the classic (and much maligned) paragon of this set, which numbers in the thousands. Remember that time you weren’t just angry but really angry? When it wasn’t you who took the last Tim-Tam, but most certainly wasn’t you? When your teenager wasn’t merely grounded, but was so grounded? Intensifiers all.
What your high school teacher may not have told you is that prefixes can do the same job. a does it in words like ashamed and asleep. re does it in words like recommend, require and receive. It also does it in words where you wouldn’t think it does, like religion, rebel and relic, and even in words where it’s no longer evident, such as ransom and rally.
In these cases, re may have, at some point, implied a repetition or turning back, but that sense has long been forgotten. What you’re looking at then is a relic, something that had a useful function once but is now a curiosity, much like your appendix or Boris Johnson.
In other cases, re was added specifically as an intensifier. Middle English saw a flurry of such words, like recomfort, many of which promptly disappeared. To recomfort someone wasn’t to comfort them twice, but to really comfort them.
The invisible re in rally and ransom is thanks to changes in spelling and pronunciation over time. Rally comes from the Old French re + alier, (“again” + “unite”). Ransom can be traced back to the Latin redemptionem, (“to buy back”), which came from red (“back” - with a d added, as Latin did before a vowel) + emere, (“to take or buy”).
Anyway, that’s enough etymology for one day. Back to me now and a third truth in this whole, sorry saga. No matter how many times you - by which I mean I - review, edit, finesse or tweak a piece of work, no matter how many times you ask yourself if this is exactly the right word to use in this exact sentence, soon after you send the writing out into the world, you will discover at least one place where you chose a word that was not exactly right, and it will ruin your day.
We all, writers and non-writers alike, experience a similar phenomenon that Germans call Treppenwitz, or “staircase joke” and the French call l’esprit de l’escalier. That’s when someone says something mean to you and instead of displaying your rapier-like wit with an immediate bon mot, you’re struck dumb or, worse, trundle out some lame response that makes you look like an idiot.
Then, as you’re leaving the building via the staircase, the perfect retort occurs to you - too late.
I don’t know about you, but years after the event such occasions can still haunt me in the dead of night, usually as I’m about to fall asleep. In my twenties I worked briefly as a taxi-despatcher, a job that called for an encyclopaedic knowledge of the city’s streets, including which were served by which taxi ranks and in what order. That is, if the primary rank for a street had no cab on it, which rank did you call next via the two-way radio system? And which one after that?
One evening when we were short staffed, one of the drivers came in to help out. Sitting down in the booth next to mine, the first thing he said to me was “you make a lot of mistakes.” I froze, then spent the rest of that shift feeling small, humiliated and deeply uncertain of myself. Today, having had time to use the stairs, I’d smile and loudly say “Thank you, Tony!” (for Tony was the arsehole’s name), then make lots of deliberate mistakes, making sure he heard every goddam one.
And I’ll tell you this: I wouldn’t have regretted my pettiness for one moment.
Bits and specious
* Morth. A new word of my invention from more + th, meaning “an ordinal number of any value greater than the highest number in the adjacent list”. Well, I thought it was new, but it turns out it was a real word in Middle English meaning “a large number”. Bastards.
Despite my earlier cheap shot, your appendix may actually be quite an important part of your immune system.
US singer Tim Storms holds the Guinness World Record for the lowest note produced by a human. Catch him here, but don’t expect to hear his world record effort. At 0.7973 Hz, it’s inaudible to the human ear.
Speaking of the human ear, last week I told you I was about to be fitted with new hearing aids. I’ve now had them for nearly three days, and it’s been fascinating to experience a flood of auditory information that can be overwhelming at times. It’s great to understand what people are saying, but my brain is yet to comfortably differentiate between conversation and every other sound coming in. Birds, let me tell you, are way too noisy (and who knew there were so many of them?). Water out of the tap is like shattering glass. And don’t you dare crinkle paper anywhere near me at the moment. I’m told the intensity will diminish, and it’s a small price to pay in any case for no longer being the jerk who would rather keep asking his wife to repeat herself than acknowledge there’s a problem with his hearing.
Quote of the week
My only regret in life is that I am not someone else.
Woody Allen
You poor sod - no more creative deafness at your disposal.
Love morth. I'm going to steal it (with credit).
Localizing problems are common with hearing aids. Part of the reason is that the external ear (auricle) helps to sort out locations. The amplifier brings sound into the eardrum directly without the filtering and reflections in the little cavities of the outer ear, so the sorting is lost.
https://www.hearingresearch.org/outer-ear/