I'm reading "History in English Words" by Owen Barfield and it's quite a refreshing look at how words we use everyday have our history locked up inside them going back thousands of years. He shows how to extract information from a word. As an example, Barfield mentions the word "electricity." It comes from the Greek "elecktor" which means "gleaming" or "the beaming sun." That gave birth to the word "electron" which means "amber" because amber, as we know, becomes attractive if we rub it. It's strange because we have appropriated the Greek word for the particles that orib the nucleus and those are the particles responsible for amber becomes attractive when we rub it.

Barfield points out that we can deduce a few things from this--that English scholars bygone centuries knew Greek, that the Greeks did not have electricity and that we relate electricity with amber. The reason we know the Greeks did not have electricity was because if they did, we would have used their word for it rather than using their word for "amber."

Another thing that' strange is that Amber is a girl's name just as we have the Amber Alert in the States. It was named after a missing girl whose name was Amber. In Greek, Elektra is a female name. You may remember her as the sister of Orestes. Her name was also Amber. Why the word is related to femininity I am not sure of. Perhaps because of the attractive force of amber is like the attractive power women have over men.

That brings up another point that Barfield makes--that our knowledge of electricity either invented new words in our vocabulary or modified old one to be used in new ways. As examples, he mentions battery, broadcast, conductor, current, force, magnet, potential, tension, terminal, wire, etc. For example, if someone claims to have found a hitherto unknown letter written by Shakespeare and it mentions high tension existing between himself and another playwright, we would know the letter is a forgery written centuries after Shakespeare's life because the term "high tension" came from our experiments with electricity and was originally used to describe the state of the space between two electrically charged bodies. Only later was it used metaphorically to describe a type of human relation.

When I was learning to play Robert Johnson's "Come On In My Kitchen," I wondered what he meant by a "nation sack." I found out it was a term used in hoodoo. "Nation" is related to "natal" and deals with birth. In fact, the Latin term for "birth" is "natio." The term is linked to a woman's genitalia because the nation sack is a female charm bag or mojo hand worn around the waist in front so that it is near the wearers genitals which are the supposed source of its power. So when we call the country we live in a nation, we are likening it to a womb in which we live and grow and are protected from outside sources. Our nation is our protective mother.

One word that most of us know the meaning of is "consider." It translates as "with stars." When you're told to consider something, you're actually being told to consult with the stars on this particular subject or issue or proposal. It indicates that at one time, things we are told to consider were things that the ancients actually did consult about with the stars or with other celestial bodies against the fixed positions of the stars.

Another example of Barfield's is "attic." It derives from the capital of the Ionians--Attica. About the 6th and 5th centuries BC, the Ionian culture was the flower of Hellenic artistry. Attic came to mean "a peculiarly finished work of art or an exquisite literary style." In the architecture of that era, it was considered asthetically pleasing to place smaller order over larger order and hence the little space at the top of the house is called an attic.

Language is like a fossil record of past concepts and customs except the fossils aren't dead, they are still living because the language which has encompassed those ideas and thoughts is still living. When the you break the words open, all this hidden history and evolutionary record of consciousness spills forth.