The Museum of Etymon

The great dark building stood by itself on the open plain, and the road ran straight past its front steps. There was no getting round it. On both sides of the road the plain had been fenced off with tall iron railings, and on every railing hung a little brass plate with one word engraved on it and that word’s original meaning.

Inquirer stopped at one and read it. Nice. Originally: ignorant, foolish. From the Latin nescius, “not knowing.”

The next one. Goodbye. Originally: “God be with ye.”

The next. Silly. Originally: blessed, holy. From the old word sælig.

“So when I tell a friend his coat’s nice,” Inquirer said slowly, “I’m really calling it ignorant?”

“According to this fence,” said Plain-Sense.

“And when a mother calls her child silly, she’s really calling it holy?”

“According to this fence.”

Analogy leaned on his stick and looked along the line of brass plates running off toward the Museum. “Every one of them’s true. Every one really is where the word came from. And not one of them tells you what the word means when you say it today.” He sighed. “Come on. Let’s get it over with.”

The great bronze doors of the Museum stood open, and above them on the long black banner hung the one word, ten feet high: Originally.

Inside it was cold and hushed and very grand. The entrance hall was enormous and domed, floored in black marble, and all round its walls in glass cases lit from underneath stood roots. Real roots, dug out of the ground, huge gnarled tangles, some as big as a man, dark and twisted and hairy. Each one had a word carved into it and a card beside it explaining what that word had “originally” meant.

At the far end of the hall, behind a great black desk, sat the curator.

He was a giant. Even sitting down he was twice the height of a man. He was very old and very pale, with a long white beard that hung down over the desk, and his hands were enormous, with long thin fingers like the roots in the cases. He wore a rusty black scholar’s gown and a velvet cap. In front of him lay an open dictionary the size of a cart, and he was going through its pages with a magnifying glass the size of a dinner plate.

He looked up as the three of them came in. His eyes were small and pale and very sharp.

“Visitors,” he said, in a voice that was deep and slow and dusty. “How gratifying. I am Etymon, curator of this collection. You have come to learn what the words of the Book really mean. Excellent. Excellent. You have come to the only place it can be learned. Welcome to the Museum of Origins.”

He got up from the desk, and standing he was bigger still. He led them through a high archway into the first gallery.

It was a long hall lined with glass cases. In each one a Greek or Hebrew word stood carved large in stone, with its root laid out below it in a shallow tray of earth, and below that a card giving the meaning Etymon had got out of the root.

“Observe,” said Etymon, stopping at the first case. The word in it was Ekklesia. “The word the Book uses for the church. Ekklesia. From ek, out of, and kaleo, to call. Therefore the church is the called-out ones. Its true meaning is a people called out of the world, separated, set apart.” He swept on. “Apostolos. From apo, away from, and stello, to send. Therefore an apostle is one sent away. Parakletos,” the next case, “from para, beside, and kaleo, to call. Therefore the Holy Spirit is one called alongside. And this,” he stopped at a case with an especially big root in it, “Hamartia. Sin. From the verb hamartano, which originally meant to miss the mark, as an archer misses. Therefore sin is missing the mark. Not rebellion. Not guilt. A near miss!”

He smiled, enormously pleased.

Inquirer looked along the cases. He couldn’t put his finger straight away on what was wrong. Some of the meanings sounded true, or near enough. The Spirit was called alongside. The church was called out of the world. But the last one bothered him.

“Sir, when Paul says all have sinned, does he just mean they’ve all had a near miss?”

Etymon frowned. “The root is the root. The root does not lie.”

“But the root isn’t the word,” said Plain-Sense. “A word means what people use it to mean. In Paul’s day, when a Greek said hamartia, was he thinking about archery?”

Etymon’s pale eyes narrowed. “Words are like trees. They grow from roots. Whatever is in the root is in the tree. Always.”

And Inquirer thought of the Woodward’s knife, and the pit, and the word that had been cut out of every rule on its walls.

“Always,” he said quietly.

Etymon gave him a sharp look but didn’t answer. He turned and led them on.

The second gallery was smaller, lit by tall windows, and in the middle of it two marble statues stood on one plinth, two men almost exactly alike, facing each other. One was carved in very pure white marble and the other in a stone just slightly darker and greyer. Under the white one was cut Agapao, and under the grey one Phileo. Both words meant to love.

“The great discovery of my collection,” said Etymon. “Two words for love. Agapao, the high, divine, self-giving love. Phileo, the low, human, merely friendly affection. Now observe the twenty-first chapter of John. After the resurrection the Lord asks Peter three times, Lovest thou me? The first two times He uses agapao, and Peter answers with phileo: Yea, Lord, I am fond of thee. Peter cannot rise to divine love! And the third time the Lord comes down to Peter’s level and uses phileo. A great condescension! Preachers have built a thousand sermons on it.”

Inquirer had heard sermons like that back home and had always found them very moving.

But Analogy had limped over on his stick to a bookshelf in the corner. He took down a concordance and started turning pages, and after a minute he gave a small, satisfied grunt.

“Here. John three, verse thirty-five. The Father loveth the Son. Which word?”

“Agapao,” said Etymon at once.

“Yes. And John five, verse twenty. For the Father loveth the Son. The same sentence, near enough. Which word?”

Etymon said nothing.

“Phileo. John uses both words for the Father’s love of the Son. And look here, chapter eleven: Lord, behold, he whom thou lovest is sick, that’s phileo, the Lord’s love for Lazarus. And two verses on, Now Jesus loved Martha, and her sister, and Lazarus, and that’s agapao. Same people, same love, both words. John moves between them the way you or I might say glad and then happy. It’s his style. He likes to vary his words, and he does it all through that last chapter too: two words for feed, two words for sheep, two for know. Nobody builds a sermon on the difference between the two words for sheep.”

He shut the concordance. “The words can differ. Sometimes they do. In John they mostly don’t. And the grief in that chapter isn’t in which word the Lord picks. It’s in the third time. Peter was grieved because He asked him three times. Three times, for three denials. That’s the point, and you’ve buried it under a distinction John wasn’t making.”

Inquirer stood quite still. Three times, for three denials. He thought of a hearing room in a glass dome, and a lantern going out, and found he couldn’t say anything.

Etymon looked from one of them to the other with his small pale eyes. A little color had come into his white cheeks.

“You have been reading usage,” he said, as if it were a dirty word.

In the third gallery they met his wife.

She was nearly as big as he was and a great deal rounder, in an enormous gown so thickly embroidered with words you could hardly see any cloth between them. She was sitting in a deep armchair in the middle of a gallery crammed with display cases, and she was eating. On a table beside her stood a tureen of thick dark soup, and she was ladling it into a bowl and drinking it with every sign of enjoyment.

“My dear,” said Etymon, “we have visitors. They do not believe in roots.”

“Oh, how dreadful,” said his wife, beaming at them. “I’m Madam Totality. Come, come, sit down, you must be starving after coming all that way through the Forest. Have some of my soup. It’s the most nourishing soup in the world. Do you know what’s in it?”

“No,” said Inquirer, carefully.

“Everything!” Madam Totality said joyfully. “I take a word, any word in the Book, and I put in everything it’s ever meant. Every use, in every book, in every century, all boiled down together, so when you read the word you get the whole lot at once! Look.” She ladled up a spoonful. “This is logos. It’s got word in it, and reason, and account, and ratio, and speech, and the divine principle of the universe from the philosophers, and a reckoning, and a matter, and a saying, and a book. All together! So when John says In the beginning was the Logos, he means all of those things at once! Isn’t it rich?”

She held out the spoon.

Inquirer looked at the dark soup. It had a very strong smell.

“Madam, when I say I give you my word, do I mean I’m giving you my reason and my ratio and the divine principle of the universe?”

Madam Totality laughed uncertainly. “Well, no, dear, not you. But the Book…”

“The Book was written in words,” said Plain-Sense, “by people who meant one thing at a time by them, same as anybody. When John wrote logos he meant something. He might have had the Greek philosophers in mind, or the Word of God that made the world in Genesis, or both. That’s a real question and worth asking. But he didn’t mean every meaning the word’s ever had all at once. Nobody does. That’s not richer. That’s just soup.”

Madam Totality’s face crumpled. “It’s very good soup,” she said, hurt.

“I’m sure it is,” said Analogy kindly. “But it isn’t reading.”

That was when Etymon lost his temper.

Inquirer told me he’d never forget the sound of it. It wasn’t a shout. It was a long low groan, like a great tree splitting, that seemed to come up out of the Museum floor itself. The glass rattled in every case. The giant drew himself up to his full height with his white beard bristling.

“Enough. You come into my Museum. You mock my roots. You insult my wife’s soup. You quote usage at me. Usage! The rabble’s way of talking! The market-place! The kitchen! You would rather know what some fishwife meant by a word in a letter to her sister than know what the word truly is, at its root, in its origin, in its essence?”

“Yes,” said Plain-Sense, simply. “Because the fishwife is how people talked. And the apostles wrote the way people talked. That’s why it’s the common Greek. Koine. That’s what Master Koine teaches.”

Etymon reached out his long root-like fingers and picked Plain-Sense up by the collar as easily as you’d pick up a kitten.

“Then you shall be an exhibit. A specimen. The Plain Reader. Originally: a pilgrim.”

He strode across the gallery to an empty glass case, opened the front, put Plain-Sense inside, shut it, and locked it with a small iron key. Plain-Sense hammered on the glass, but no sound got through.

Inquirer flew at the giant. Etymon just reached down and caught him by the back of the coat, lifted him off his feet, and did the same to him. Analogy, with his stick and his splinted leg, could only stand there and watch both his friends locked into glass cases side by side.

Then Etymon turned to the old bookbinder.

“And you. The cross-referencer. You need no case. You can barely walk. You may stay and keep my wife company.” He gave a thin smile. “She will feed you soup.”

He went back to his desk in the entrance hall. Madam Totality, looking a little uncomfortable, ladled out a bowl and held it out to Analogy.

Inquirer told me that the night in the case was strange more than it was terrible. The case wasn’t small; he could sit, and even lie down. It wasn’t cold. But the glass was thick and no sound came through it. He could see the gallery dimly, and Plain-Sense in the next case, and Analogy in a chair beside Madam Totality, refusing soup.

There was a card on the floor of his case. He picked it up. It said: Inquirer. Originally: Self-Reader. A polisher of mirrors. Root meaning: one who sees only himself.

He sat looking at it for a long time.

It was true, in its way. That was what he had been. That was his root. And for a while in the dark he wondered whether Etymon was right. Perhaps the root was the meaning. Perhaps underneath he’d always be Self-Reader, and all the road had done was put a new name on the old root. Perhaps he’d end the way he’d started, and the Exchange had only proved it.

Then he put his hand in his pocket and found the little grey pebble from the spring under the Cross.

And he remembered that he wasn’t what he had been. He was what he had been made. If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new. A man’s root wasn’t his meaning any more than a word’s was. What God had done with him was his meaning, what he was now, in use, in the Author’s hand.

He laughed out loud, alone in his silent case. Then he turned the card over, and on the back of it, with a stub of pencil out of his pack, he wrote: Meaning determined by present use.

Some time after midnight a light came into the gallery.

It was a small, plain, swinging light, an ordinary tin lantern, carried by a small, plain, ordinary woman, elderly and stout, in a print apron and a cap. She had a bucket and mop in one hand and a great ring of keys at her belt that jangled as she walked, and she was humming a hymn under her breath.

She put her bucket down in the middle of the gallery and began mopping the black marble, working her way round case by case. When she got to Inquirer’s she stopped and peered in at him, then at Plain-Sense, and then over at Analogy dozing in his chair.

“Hullo,” she said. Her voice came through the glass very faintly, as if from a long way off. “More of you, is it? He’s been at it again.”

Inquirer pressed his face to the glass. “Who are you?”

“Me? I’m the charwoman. Mrs. Usage. I clean the place.” She sniffed. “Have done these thousand years. Never been paid. He doesn’t know I’m here, mostly. Thinks the floors clean themselves.” She looked at the card in his hand, the one he’d turned over, squinted at what he’d written on the back, and her face creased into a broad smile. “Well, now. Somebody’s been learning.”

She put down her mop and started going through the great ring at her belt. There were hundreds of keys on it, all different, all worn bright with handling.

“He’s got his one little key, and it only locks. Mine are the ones that open. I’ve got a key for every word in the Book. Not from its root. From how it was used. Every letter, every bill of sale, every marriage contract, every scrap of paper ordinary folk wrote on in the Lord’s own time. They’ve been digging them up out of the rubbish heaps in Egypt for a hundred years now, and every one of them’s a key. You want to know what a word meant to Paul? Find out what it meant to the fishwife writing to her sister. Then find out how Paul used it himself, all through his letters. Then look at it in the sentence he put it in. That’s how you open it. Not by digging for its root.”

She found the key she wanted and fitted it into the lock of his case. It turned without any trouble, and the glass front swung open.

“Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me. Thank the fishwife.” She moved on to Plain-Sense’s case and let him out too. “Now hurry. He sleeps at his desk in the front hall, and the front doors are the only way out. You’ll have to get past him.”

They woke Analogy. Madam Totality had dropped off in her armchair and was snoring gently with the ladle in her lap. They crept past her and out through the archway.

But Mrs. Usage didn’t take them back the way they’d come. “Too near his desk,” she whispered. “There’s a back way, through the other galleries. Mind what you look at.”

She led them through room after room by the light of her tin lantern, and in each room as they went through Inquirer caught a glimpse of the other things Etymon had collected.

In one there were cases of words labelled Technical Terms, each with a card insisting that the word meant exactly the same thing everywhere it turned up, like a term in a lawbook. Sanctification: always the lifelong process of growth in holiness. “Not always,” Mrs. Usage whispered as they passed. “Sometimes it means being set apart once and for all, at the start. Ye are sanctified, says Paul, to a church full of sinners. Depends how he’s using it.”

In another was a case labelled The Hebrew Mind, with a statue of a man thinking in pictures and actions, and opposite it one labelled The Greek Mind, with a statue of a man thinking in abstractions, and a card between them that said: Because Hebrew has no word for X, the Hebrews could not conceive of X. “Nonsense,” whispered Mrs. Usage. “Every tongue can say anything it needs to. It just says it different. Folk aren’t caged in by their grammar.”

In a third there was a case full of rare dusty words, each with a card that began In one obscure papyrus from the third century BC, this word appears to mean…, and under that an elaborate new reading of some verse in the Book. “Strange meanings from strange places,” whispered Mrs. Usage. “When a word’s used a thousand times one way and once another way in some scrap nobody understands, he goes for the scrap. Always the unlikely one. Makes him feel clever.”

In a fourth there was a case showing a word as John used it, and next to it a case showing the same word as Paul used it, with a card insisting they must mean exactly the same because they were the same word. “World,” whispered Mrs. Usage. “John’s world is often the whole of mankind set against God. Paul uses it his own way. And both of them use it more than one way. Every writer’s got his habits. You learn his. You don’t make them all talk alike.”

The last room was very small, with a single case holding a jar of mixed seeds. The card said: Selective Evidence. Only those uses of a word which support the curator’s reading have been retained. All others have been disposed of. Next to it stood a full rubbish bin.

At last they came to a little door that let them into the front hall behind the black marble pillars. Across the hall, between them and the great bronze doors, Etymon sat asleep at his desk with his head on his enormous dictionary, breathing slow and deep, his long root-fingers trailing over the edge of the desk onto the floor.

“Quiet as you can,” breathed Mrs. Usage. “Keep to the wall.”

They crept along the wall. Analogy’s stick tapped on the marble however careful he was. Tap. Tap. Halfway across, the giant stirred and muttered in his sleep, “Originally… originally…” They froze. He settled again.

They got to the bronze doors. Mrs. Usage fitted one of her keys into the lock, a very big, very old one, and it groaned as it turned.

Etymon woke.

He lifted his great head off the dictionary and saw them, and he came up out of his chair roaring. The sound shook the dome. He crossed the black floor in three strides with his long fingers reaching. Mrs. Usage wrenched the door open and shoved Analogy through, and Plain-Sense went after him, half carrying the bookbinder. Inquirer was last.

The giant’s fingers closed on his collar.

Inquirer didn’t struggle. He turned round in Etymon’s grip and held up the card from his glass case, the back of it, where he’d written in the night, so the giant could see.

“Meaning,” he said, “is determined by use.”

And a strange thing happened.

All round the walls of the entrance hall, in their lit glass cases, the great roots began to move. They stirred and stretched and broke out of the cases and came snaking across the black marble and wound themselves round the giant’s legs. Up over his knees they went, and round his waist, and pinned his arms to his sides, until Etymon stood rooted to his own floor, held fast by his own collection, roaring.

Inquirer pulled himself loose from the giant’s fingers and stepped back.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and found he meant it. “Roots are real. They matter. Sometimes they help. But they’re where words come from, not what they mean. You’ve let them grow over everything.”

And he went out through the bronze doors into the dawn.

Mrs. Usage didn’t come with them. She stood in the doorway with her bucket and mop, her ring of keys glinting in the first light.

“I’ll stay. Somebody’s got to do the floors. And he’ll be loose by noon; the roots never hold him long. He’ll be wanting his breakfast.” She sniffed. “Totality’ll make him soup.”

She went through her keys one last time, took a small plain key of bright brass off the ring, and put it in Inquirer’s hand.

“That’s the one. Opens most things. When you come to a word in the Book you don’t understand, don’t go digging for its root and don’t chuck everything in the pot. Ask how it’s used. How it was used in the writer’s day, by ordinary folk. How this writer uses it, in his other books and other places. How it’s used right here, in this sentence, with these words round it. He picked it to say one thing, here. Find that one thing. That’s all.”

Inquirer looked at the key. Engraved on it, very small, was one word: Usage.

“Thank you.”

“Thank the fishwife,” said Mrs. Usage again, and smiled, and went back inside to her mopping. The great bronze doors swung shut behind her. Over them the word Originally hung limp on its black banner in the windless dawn.

The three pilgrims went on east, Analogy limping between the other two. The plain began to rise under their feet, and on the horizon a range of tall blue mountains came into view. On the highest peak of all, catching the first of the sun, stood a single white tower.