Disconnected
Book time
During our daily dog walks I’ve been enjoying the audiobook of Richard Holmes’ history of 18th century science, “The Age of Wonder”.
This is one of those delightful books full of bits of trivia that are largely news to me. For instance, I had no idea that comets are called comets because their long, flowing tails reminded the first astronomers of hair.
The ancient Greek term for hair that’s on fleek is κόμη, pronounced koh-may. That’s not to be confused with θρίξ (thríx) which is how Socrates and Plato would have referred to the rumpled, bedhead look. But anyway, the point is that from a word-origin standpoint, their old koh-may became our modern kah-met. A comet is just a star with a rockin’ mullet.
How cool is that, I thought. And, after a moment’s reflection, how cool that two completely different words — comet and comb — must share a common starting point. It had to be: they sound the same and they’re both hair words.
Truth be told I was more than a little pleased with myself for having found this concealed connection.
There is something deeply satisfying in discovering a hidden relationship between two far-flung things. If you’re old enough you might remember a BBC show from the 70’s called, as it happens, Connections. Every week James Burke would explain how seemingly disparate stuff happened to be linked by a largely unknown history. I loved that show. Everyone did, because it made us all feel a little bit smarter.
The dogs and I returned home in a happy Burkean frame of mind. And that lasted until I opened my iPad to check wiktionary, only to discover a comb has nothing whatsoever to do with hair, at least etymologically. It didn’t even descend from the Greek, but apparently evolved from some Proto-Indo-European word meaning tooth.
So no lovely connection after all. Bummer. Linguistic lunch bag letdown.
Not quite willing to give up, I figured there had to be other unexpected words related to comet. Comma, in particular, seemed a likely candidate. After all, their cute little curls do make them look a bit like punctuation marks with hair. Nope. Because a comma divides up text, it originates with the ancient Greek verb to cut, κόπτω (kóptō). And for the record, should you find yourself in a coma, you’ll be in a κῶμα (kôma) — deep sleep in English — which has everything to do with what’s going on inside your head and very little with what’s on top of it.
Ah well. Just because something feels right doesn’t necessarily mean it is right.
The psychology of this is probably more interesting than the history of the words themselves. After all, I have to admit it was more emotionally satisfying to make a wrong assumption than it was to uncover the truth. Feeling smart, apparently, is more enjoyable than actually knowing things. At the end of the day, not everything is connected with underlying meaning, even if we’d like it to be. Some stuff, well… it’s just stuff.