Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 33, No. 683.
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        Date: 2020-03-23 21:13:28+00:00
        From: Francois Lachance 
        Subject: etymologies astray Re: [Humanist] 33.679: we continue

Willard

A little digression, hors-piste.

Taking you up on your invitation to compose reflective notes. I plucked from the
bookshelves Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor (in a volume accompanied by AIDS
and Its Metaphors). The text of course differs from the New York Review of Books
article "Disease as Political Metaphor" which you so kindly provided a link
to.

In my reading I stumbled across an item of interest to lexicographers...

Sontag notes

[quote]
Cancer patients are lied to, not just because the disease is (or is thought to
be) a death sentence, but because it is felt to be obscene -- in the original
meaning of that word: ill-omened, abominable, repugnant to the senses.
[/quote]

I was wondering why didn't Sontag push this to the off-scene meaning. I took out
the magnifying glass and checked the Compact Edition of the OED (I don't have a
subscription to the online OED). Not finding that particular etymology I took my
scouting online. Various discussions online quote the OED Third Edition to the
effect that the off-scene is a folk etymology derived by a suggestion by Varro.


Michael Newcity in The Invention of Obscenity provides a handy compendium of
various other etymologies ...

https://slaviccenters.duke.edu/sites/slaviccenters.duke.edu/files/Obscenity_Newc
ity.pdf

[quote]

There are many theories concerning the origins of the Latin word obscaenus. They
include theories that obscēnus is based on:

-- a combination of ob- (meaning 'on account of') + cænum/caenum/coenum,
which means filth, dirt, uncleanness;

-- canendo, meaning singing, making sound, utterance, thus making an impure or
vile utterance or sound obscaenus; and

-- the word obscurus, meaning 'concealed'.

[/quote]

Ah what a rabbit hole! I am intrigued at what point Varro may have been chased
off the stage and his proposed etymology relegated to folk status.

Francois Lachance
Scholar-at-large
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~lachance
https://berneval.hcommons.org

to think is often to sort, to store and to shuffle: humble, embodied tasks





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