Word Worries

My mother (who is a reader of the paper as a byproduct of using between her rows to keep the weeds down in her garden) has often suggested that setting good habits early leads to better results.  Since January is officially the season to at least put on a big show of starting new, better habits, I will demonstrate this principle here by getting back into the Word Worries habit.

Thinking about my mom is relevant to the topic I want to look at this week for a few reasons.  For one, as January sets in I’ve been thinking about just how “real” the boundary between one year and the next is.  

On the one hand, the jokes about “I’ll see you next year” that start sometime at the end of December, and turn into “I haven’t seen you since last year” in January, underline the artificial nature of designating a whole different categorical reality at the tick of a second hand on New Year’s Eve.  One the other hand, recognizing the cyclical nature of the annual calendar is what allowed humanity to crawl out of the primordial muck and take up many of the activities that make us “advanced”—like agriculture, navigation, seventh grade algebra classes, digital watches, and QR Codes for fifty cents off any purchase at World O’Stuff.

It would be exhausting for everyone to put up with me going through how reliable means of measuring and predicting both seasonal and daily time created our human world.  It’s a fundamental sense, and one that we don’t always actively acknowledge.  Over the past few decades, the concept of the “five senses” has come to be seen as antiquated, with researchers from many fields noting that we actually perceive many things that don’t fit into one of those five categories, but are not ESP or telekinesis.  Some examples include nausea, equilibrioception (balance), nociception (pain awareness), interoception (hunger and thirst), scopaesthesia (the sense that you are being looked at), echolocation, and many more, including “chronoception”.  If you are one of those people who are convinced that you always know what time it is before you consult a watch or clock and then congratulate yourself when you prove yourself right, we should start a very obnoxious club—a club of chonocepters.  Of course, if you only congratulate yourself when you’re right and ignore the others, you’re exhibiting a different, false sense called “apophenia” (which is selective perception that confirms an underlying bias).

In any case, the real words I want to consider in the context of the New Year are the ones (I’m returning to discussing my mother out of what is called “Presque vu” in French—the sense that something has been forgotten just out of sight) are the ones related to Baby New Year.

Since there is no immediate distinction between December 31 and January 1 other than the numbers used to describe them and the tax liabilities that define them, we have for centuries used the concept of a year that is born wherever we set the “beginning” of the year, and then ages until it expires and starts the process all over again.  People older than 50 probably associate the term “Baby New Year” with the mildly unsettling Rankin-Bass stop motion animated Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer TV short from the 70s, but the baby image exists in newspapers from as far back as the eighteenth century, and has prior echoes in classical Greek and Latin writing.

Latin is the immediate source of a cluster of words we use that are derived from the terms “natal” and “nasci” and their associated forms, all of which mean “birth.”  We just experienced the Nativity season, for instance, which refers to a scene depicting the birth of Jesus and the circumstances of his natality.  

The same roots are responsible for the words “native,” which links the concepts of birth to location, as well as “innate,” which refers to everything a person is “born with.”  

Clinical usages such as “neo-natal,” “pre-natal” and so on are familiar to most people, and that’s where the metaphor and the reality of the year intersect.

Like a newborn babe in its mother’s arms, the year is usually welcomed with a sense of optimism and goodwill, even if the circumstances of the birth were difficult or more turbulent than anticipated.  The first moments of both can be described as “nascent,” which is a participle form of the Latin verb that emphasizes the “in progress” *nature (*also a related term, for bonus points) of the new entity.  To be “nascent” is to be “being born, or having just been born.”  

“Nascent” is often used to describe emerging ideas, trends, industries, groups, technologies, and whatever else we choose to identify at the moment of its birth.  The trick is, that the word “nascent” has uniformly positive connotations.  There are other words that express anxiety about the same things, but this word strikes the right tone, in my opinion.  Of course we want the best for it.  Of course we have high hopes for it.  We know it is perfect and blameless.  We know it can be whatever it wants.

Like my mom, we will try to hold out that hope as long as possible with our fingers crossed. 

We’ll give the year some allowances for growing pains in its youth, and try not to compare it to its siblings.   We’ll start to roll our eyes a bit in its middle age, as its complaints become routines.  We’ll consider giving up on it as it goes through its late mid-life crisis, but we’ll come back around to mourn its decline and passage, all while secretly biding our time to see that fresh new baby set to take its place.  And then we’ll memorialize it with these kinds of media funerals.

For today though, we’ll accept it openly.  We’ll wait until tomorrow to start wondering about our parenting skills.