understanding the substance of this post

Unless you're a language geek, you should close this tab right now. Seriously. Go see what Roger Ebert or Bill Simmons is doing instead. I won't mind.

Because I was reminded the other day that somewhere in The Great Code, Northrop Frye casually makes a passing remark (one of many) which in lesser hands could easily be a book on its own. (I'll try to track down the specific page number.)

He points out the word "understand" and asks us to look at it, literally.

Actually look at that word.

Why would you have to stand under something in order to understand it?

Now, if you're like me you say, hmm, that's interesting, but it's probably just some sort of charming linguistic weirdness having to do with Celts, Roman legionaries, Saxons, Vikings and arrogant Normans all washing up on the same little island off the coast of France. There's got to be some trivial reason for the word to be like that.

But then Frye points out the fact that "substance" comes from exactly the same metaphor – the substance of something has to do with standing under that thing.

So you say, hey, that actually is really interesting. The physical relationship between knowledge and the knower is identical in those two words. But what the hell does that mean? Where does that come from?

No source that I (in a couple of extremely haphazard and lazy searches) or Frye (who was one of the century's great readers) have been able to find could explain it. What's the underlying thought behind the metaphor? How did the originators understand "understand"?

• Do you have to in some way possess the foundation, base or feet of a thing in order to "get" it?

• Does it mean that you hold it in your grasp, that you support its reality in some way through comprehending it?

• Does it imply subservience to the thing that you are trying to comprehend? That you're a slave to its reality?

Now, language changes, especially this mish-mash that we Englishers speak. The prefixes "under" and "sub" didn't always mean what they mean now. Think about the verb to "undertake" and the fact it has nothing to do with digging, your associations with "undertaker" aside.

The Shorter OED and some eighteenth century examples I've found suggest that our old buddy Plato might be at work here, thanks to his idea that the tangible reality of a thing is separate from its true reality, its substance. There is an ideal bowling pin (maybe just the idea of a bowling pin) and then there are many real bowling pins, each in essence a bad photocopy of that true reality. And one of the meanings that the Shorter OED gives for "substance" is "reality." And the idea that this sludgy world we call "reality" isn't the real world, but merely a reflection of it, fits in nicely to Christian theology, where heaven and hell are the "true" worlds and our plane of existence is merely a waystation in which Satan and Christ fight over our souls.

But still, the two words are very old, and from different origins. From what I can tell "understand" is an Old English word with Germanic roots, and "substance" is an early Latin word. It's not ridiculous to think that the latter influenced the former, but that also implies a cultural meaning, not just a purely linguistic one. It's not like some monk could simply decide that "understand" would mean "understand" without all the other monks and many other people agreeing with him.

Maybe I'm making too much of all this. After all, the philosopher Jacques Maritain writes (careful with your clicking, there's Kant):

...the etymology of a word does not always give us the key to its actual meaning. In our epoch of religious liberty, a Protestant may spend his whole life without actually protesting against any religious dogma. He still calls himself and really is a Protestant.

Sure, etymology isn't meaning, but to me this point misses the mark. I understand why Protestants are so called, even if an individual believer doesn't actually protest anything, because the etymology is the word's history: Protestantism arose from protest. The word captures a pivotal moment in European history, but it's also a roadmap to how that individual believer ended up wherever they are.

"Understand" and "substance" don't offer us those same keys to knowledge. They're both so obscure and yet after two thousand odd years so powerfully clear that they invite us to ask more questions. Maybe they even goad us. And that's not such a bad thing either.

another olde tyme post on the earlie education of a nascent copywriter

As avid readers of this blog (and there seem to be at least couple who don't share an IP address with me) may remember, my first adventure in this glamourous endeavour we call Marketing was as a proofreader in the in-house advertising department of the unsinkable luxury liner of Canadian retail, Eaton's. (Or, chez Québec, Eaton.)

Now, this in-house operation was serious. It was several times larger than some agencies I have subsequently worked at. It pumped out multiple newspaper ads every day, for dailies all across the country, as well as national flyers, DM inserts, credit card statements, in-store signage for over 100 stores, and retail radio spots. They had even just installed computers throughout the department, and set up their own studio using the biggest, fastest Macs being made – the Mac IIcx, I think. In retrospect, for 1989, it was pretty advanced.

I was slightly awed. (Keep in mind, I finished university in one of the last years it was possible to be an undergrad without a computer.) There were some really good people there, folks I learned a lot from. There was a whole new and very precise way of looking at language, something I hadn't really bothered to cultivate at university. And there was a pantload of material to proofread, with most flyers having several versions, based on both pricing and language variations. But in spite of my awe, there was one thing that deeply bothered me.

The tagline. Eaton's tagline throughout the late '80s made no sense to me.

We are. Canada's department store

The necessity to declare your own existence seemed a trifle desperate. (With good reason as it turned out.) But worse for me was the lack of a final period. How can you introduce the idea of a period halfway through a sentence, placing it with a good deal of arbitrariness, then abolish it three words later? Seeing as how they'd hired me as a proofreader, I began to obsess about this. How could mistakes like this happen? No one I worked with seem to know, or at least didn't want to share with some half-bright rookie asking stupid questions.

About a month after I got hired, the Advertising Department held its annual Christmas party.

I was pretty reserved; I didn't know a lot of people, and I was still figuring out who was who, let alone what my job entailed. But for the dinner, I found myself sitting at the same table as the VP of Marketing. (Let me assure you, this isn't a tale of drunken embarrassment.) He was courtly, and solicited people's thoughts, and actual dialogue seemed to occur. Lord knows it was probably painful work for him, but he didn't make it seem that way.

Anyway, at one these junctures of actual dialogue, I somehow found the nerve to ask about the missing period. And he didn't tell me to piss off. He gave me a response filled with what turned out to be the first nuance and insight I encountered in this business.

He said that when they first came up with the line, they had tried it the logical way, with a single period at the end, and that it had seemed a little flat. Then they came up with the two sentence structure, with two periods, but somehow that seemed off, too flat a declaration. Then someone had had the flash of insight to erase the final period, and the declaration "We are" got balanced by the openness of whatever followed, usually "Canada's department store." (It was a little like today's Nissan Shift campaign, with multiple phrases getting dropped in.) Suddenly the damn thing worked.

I had never thought of this before. I'd just assumed that applying the rules to the language would make it correct, and therefore right. As soon as I started thinking about what the line would look like properly punctuated, I saw exactly what he meant.

It was the first time I understood in a working sense that advertising language didn't have to be prose; that it could, if not be poetry, at least use some of the techniques and freedoms of poetry. 

It was the first demonstration I had that what works is much more important than what is correct.

And no, I didn't get fired. I don't think he remembered my name or my impertinence the next day. A nice secondary lesson that it never hurts to ask.