Where does the Word come from?
A brief metaphysics of capitalization
“What the reader really seeks from the writer, and what the child seeks from his mother, is not a moral sentence. It is an ethical point of view—the attentiveness and the curiosity borne of the clear-eyed recognition of both self and others.” — Merve Emre1
When considering variations among the definitions of a word, it can be difficult to locate the root-idea from which diverse definitions spring. The word “capitalize,” for example, is a verb that carries the sense of taking a chance, gaining advantage, providing with resources, converting into wealth, and, of course, writing in capital letters. That’s a lot of action to navigate. Where does it all come from—where are this verbal river’s headwaters?
It is in the dense forest of definitions—or, conversely, on the featureless plain of a seemingly singular meaning—that the magical compass of etymology can help us find our way: can help us see through a term’s current operations into its inherently multilingual past.2 With “capitalize,” etymology leads almost too-directly back to the Proto-Indo-European root *kaput-, meaning “head,” which Latin capitalis and ultimately English capital channeled into meaning “main, principal, chief, dominant, first.”
Capital letters are a sublime example of how immediately our senses weld written characters, let alone words, to new layers of abstraction. “Indeed,” writes David Abram, my recent muse, “today it is virtually impossible for us to look at a printed word without seeing, or rather hearing, what ‘it says.’ For our senses are now coupled, synaesthetically, to these printed shapes as profoundly as they were once wedded to cedar trees, ravens, and the moon.”
The fact that a capital letter is so called for standing at the “head” of a sentence or word is basically immaterial to our current understandings (as is the fact that “uppercase” and “lowercase” once denoted the relative locations of metal type in letterpress drawers); we read capitalization—which starts a sentence and makes both nouns and adjectives proper—with transcendent ease.
However, when I read with the fullness of my perceiving body, I wonder at these capitals, their power to direct and determine. Are they tyrants or puppets? Are they ethical? Are they essential?
Consider the fact that a simple act of capitalization can be taken so seriously as to express fundamental conceptions of the presence, potential, and nature of divinity.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” In the Gospel of John, the majuscule W portends (“stretches forth”) an origin of eternally begotten greatness: the Word of God is the Word as pre-existent person of Christ, who is at the same time fully God and fully human.
This is the Word as Logos (Λόγος), the divine reason implicit in the cosmos. Douglas Harper of the magisterial Etymonline provides a succinct and clear-sighted history of this view: “The Greek word was used by Neo-Platonists in metaphysical and theological senses involving notions of both ‘reason’ and ‘word’ and subsequently picked up by New Testament writers.”
What I find most inspiring about this theological confluence is that it fundamentally disrupts distinctions between single entities (proper nouns, capitalized) and classes of entities (common nouns, not capitalized).3 Befitting the root sense of religion as “binding fast,” it is a way of saying that progenitor and progeny are distinct yet indivisible. It all makes me think that capitalization is less a marker of sovereignty than self-emptying: the sense in which each word shepherds the meaning of every other.
To capitalize, then, may be less about “gaining advantage” than gathering meaning. How might we disrupt current socioeconomic understandings of capital and capitalization, dominion and the commons, in accord with this view? Can we recognize divinity in both Word and word?
“The Mother Trap,” The New Yorker, p.91 (25 September 2023)
Speaking a second (third, fourth, etc.) language is like opening as many doors into the palace of etymology, which to the poet is a bit like the kingdom of heaven.
These statements pertain to English, but of course the parameters of capitalization shift rather dramatically from language to language.
You have a great mind Joe!