Puck

essay by Brian Charles Clark

The practice of letter writing seems to be disappearing along with the word, epistle. In The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life, Thomas Moore laments the excuse that “we’re too busy.” “In letters and essays written by previous generations, I’m struck by the absence of the common modern complaint ‘I didn’t write because I’m too busy’” [page 6]. If it were just the loss of the word, I wouldn’t worry; but the practice of writing letters is disappearing as well. Moore, in Soul Mates, argues a strong case for the intimacy and clarity of affect that are possible in letters. The epistolary form has been, from ancient times, a way of offering counsel, consolation, and conspiracy. Today, the letter is created to look personal, but it’s just my name ink-jetted on a form. College classes are offered in letter writing—but for the purpose of becoming an effective capitalist, not a good lover or adviser.

Perhaps the intimacy of a letter is just a little too religious or philosophical for these millennial days. The apostles, especially Paul, wrote the most famous epistles. Apostle and epistle are directly cognate, through the Greek stellein, “to put in order, prepare, send, make compact. (Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes are from theAmerican Heritage Dictionary.) Although Moore doesn’t mention it in Soul Mates in his passage about letter writing, epistle, a thought from the heart, is also cognate with diastole and systole. The very rhythm of the blood of life runs through some of the great letters of history: those of Abelard and Heloise come to mind, as well as those of Ficino and Einstein. For James Joyce, letters were his life’s blood: he was always writing people to ask for money—or to explain his work!

Some letters are written with a still, quiet heart. Still, in this sense, is related to epistle through their common Indo-European root, *stel, “to put, stand, with derivatives referring to a standing object or place.” I might have thought that the editor’s stet, “let it stand,” from Latin staré, “to stand,” might be descended from this same root, but it’s not. Stet is from PIE *sta, which yields a vast oasis of words. It’s a close call though. Through the Germanic line, from *sta, we get steed and stud. From the Frankish *stal, from *stel, we get stallion. I guess *sta and *stel are horses of slightly different colors. They both have the meaning “to stand.” *stel gives us a couple other horse words: pedestal, from Old Italian stallo; and install, from Medieval Latin stallum. Stallo and stallum both mean “stall,” a house for a horse.

Another close call is epistle (*stel) and epistemology (*sta). Horace, the Golden Age (or was he Silver?) Latin poet, invented the epistolary form of literature, in which letters were written in stanzas. No cigar, though, as stanza is descended from *sta. As is understand, epistemology’s Old English understudy. I’m sure at some point in the distant past *sta and *stel must have been “kissing cousins.” We get stem from *sta and stalk from *stel, but they both mean the same thing: that botanical bit that keeps the flower or tree standing. Perhaps writing letters from the depths of the heart or intellect, like kissing one’s cousin, is verging on the taboo—then again, maybe I’m just running amok. Amok and taboo are both borrowed into English from the languages of “strangers”—a word synonymous with the Latin barbaria, “foreign country.” I wonder if writing letters to strangers in foreign countries is still a popular activity for children—when I was a kid we called it having a “pen pal.”

Letter and epistle were both borrowed into English from those strangers from across the Channel, the Norman French. In Latin, *deph became littera, “possibly borrowed from Greek diphthera in the sense of ‘tablet’ via Etruscan.” From there English gets its letter, as well as literary and literature. The English word letter, in turn, stems from the Latin word littera; this singular form gives us “a component of the alphabet,” while the plural—litterae—gives us the meaning “a document.” Positively syllogistic, that, from part to whole.

Back another thousand or so years, and we run into the PIE *deph, curiously enough, in this context, meaning “to stamp.” (Think cuneiform, carved or stamped letters, and of the labor involved and what you might do to speed it up.) The suffixed form of *deph-s-ter gives rise in ancient Greek to diphthera, “a prepared hide… used to write on.” The metaphorical connection seems clear enough: to make one’s mark is to put one’s stamp on something, and so we sign, seal and have delivered a letter.

The Normans, when they were the bosses of what became our English, got things for “free,” and so to frank one’s mail is to be able to send it without charge. “Free; open” is an obsolete sense of the word frank. Nowadays, of course, barbarians and presidents alike must place a stamp on the envelope in order to have it delivered. If once I claimed that metaphor is a slow and lumbering camel, I might have done better to call it the Pony Express of meaning. The Indo-Europeans, after all, practically invented the horse.

Time to sew up this open letter to all those who are too busy to write, and tie off the loose ends. That’s easy: I’ve been saying for a while now that all literary activity, by metaphorical Pony Express, stems back to weaving. From a suffixed form of the PIE root *sta–*sta-mon–we get the botanical term penstemon, again meaning stem. But penstemon comes from the Greek word stemon, and that means “thread.” And that’s no stalking horse.

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