Lost Words

Words, like businesses, often fail. If they make it, we don't give the matter a second thought; we just incorporate the word(s) into our language and use it(them). If they don't make it, we usually don't even hear about the words; they just go the way of the "beta" video system or early versions of computer operating systems.

Yet just as we can learn much from our own errors or failings, we can glean a lot of knowledge from words that never really "made" it. The purpose of this essay is to explore a few of them, using a few of my favorite dictionaries (the OED and the Century) and some classical texts that supposedly illustrate their use.

Starting with "Apagoge"

Three words that seemed like a good idea to someone when they were invented, are apagoge, aparithmesis, and apanthropization/apanthropy. But they each rose for a moment, like the proverbial spring flower, only to be discarded by the time summer emerged. Let's begin with apagoge (ap a GO jee). The term means "leading away" or "abduction." The problem with the word is that it seemed to emerge in the middle of the 18th century (the 1753 Chambers Encyclopedia) with three distinct definitions, none of which really caught on. It would be nice to know why the term was so suddently invented in different venues. In mathematics it meant a "demonstration which does not prove a thing directly but shows the absurdity or impossibility of denying it." Thus, as this definition, it is the same as a reductio ad absurdam, a Latin term which has its first attestation in an English-language text in 1659. This comes ultimately from Aristotle's Prior Analytics, where he talks about the "he eis to adunaton apagoge" ("the reduction into the impossible").

Second, apagoge is, in logic, a "species of syllogism or syllogistic reasoning otherwise known as "abuction." Abduction is derived from the Latin abductio, a word used by Giulio Pacio (1550-1635) in translating apagoge in the 25th chapter of the Second Book of Aristotle's Prior Analytics. Before his work, apagoge was translated as "deductio" or "reductio," but with the new rendering, a new possibility of meaning might possibly have dawned. It means a syllogism of which the major premise is known or evident, while the minor, though not really evident, is as credible or more credible than the conclusion. It really isn't a very powerful means of proof, but it is useful to know to characterize another's arguments--especially if you want to show that he/she is lacking. Just call it/them an example of apagoge or abduction.

Finally, apagoge has a meaning in mathematics, as "a progress or passage from one proposition to another, when the first having been once demonstrated, is afterwards employed for the proving of others." But I am not sure that all would agree with this. For example, Prof. Vassalis Karasmanis delivered a paper in Tel Aviv on the mathematical conception of apagoge in 2001. He argued that Aristotle's words regarding apagoge in the Prior Analytics had been taken up by Proclus, who said that "the first to effect apagoge of difficult geometrical propositions was Hippocrates of Chios." Karmsmanis concluded that this method was "an early form of the method of analysis and synthesis and consists roughly in reducing one problem or theorem to another. Reductions can be continued until we arrive at something already known or something that is possible to be proved directly."

Now you can see why none of these usages of apagoge really caught on--principally because we had other words, more useful words, to describe what was going on. In this case a word might actually have obscured meaning and it, like a veil, must be removed in order to see the beauty of the face beneath it.

Apanthrophy and Aparithmesis

The Greek prefix "a" or "ap" means "away from." Thus, the word apanthropy means to "get away from"...people. It is noteworthy that its first appearance, in Chambers' 1753 Cyclopedia, referred to a medical condition. By the mid-19th century apanthropy appeared in a medical dictionary as "a species of melancholy, characterized by dislike to society." I think that misanthropy, which had been around in English a century before apanthropy, and had the advantage of a literary example in Shakespeare's Timon of Athens, probably ultimately overwhelmed apanthropy and rendered it unnecessary. Today we have terms like antisocial and misanthropic to characterize the phenomenon of a person who is excessively solitary.

Finally, let's conclude with a word about aparithmesis. It also first appears in Chambers, and was identified as a rhetorical term meaning "enumeration." Yet the quotation given is "the answer to the protasis or proposition itself." Then, the one example gives a Latin quotation from one of Cicero's early speeches, Pro Quinctio. Cicero tries to defend Quinctius against charges that he defaulted on ownership of a partnership with a certain Naevius in Gaul. As the speech develops, however, Cicero uses various literary devices to build his case. He is trying to say that had Naevius really wanted to dissolve or settle accounts in the partnership, he had ample opportunity to do so with Quinctius while he was in Gaul. So, Cicero asks in the example of aparithmesis (enumeration) cited: appellandi tempus non erat? "Was there no time for asking?," to which the response (misquoted in the OED/Chambers quotation) was (in Cicero's actual text): tecum plus annum vixit, or "he lived with you more than a year." What Cicero is doing here is making a case why his disinherited client ought not to lose his partnership--by exposing the nefarious conduct of Naevius. So, he gives an example of what a normal and honest person would have done to dissolve a partnership, and since he concludes that Naevius didn't do it, he has a case for improper partnership dissolution.

But it is hard to see how this is an "enumeration" of anything. It is a sort of rhetorical question, an example of conduct that should have happened. However, in definese of the term, it might be the first item on a list, and indeed, if you continue to read the oration, Cicero continues to ask other questions, so the quotation might only be referring to the first in a list of rhetorical or enumerative questions. But there isn't greater specificity here in the definition, and when rhetorical handbooks actually got around to talking about enumeration, they did so through two Latin terms, dinumeratio and enumeratio, rather than aparithmesis. And so, the last term was lost, and no one reads Pro Quinctio anymore. And so the words die, and we barely can trace their weakly-sounding history...

That's enough for today. I am ready for some success stories. Aren't you?

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