I have put off work on the third and fourth installments of my discussion of the recently concluded session of the US Supreme Court until next week. I owe you one on very-Trumpy jurisprudential subjects and another, concluding piece on SCOTUS that will have a not-so-Trumpy focus. But the work on them has taken longer than I thought it would, and there have been troubles at the homestead that have taken my mind off of it for stretches, so I will give you lighter fare today and tomorrow and finish up on SCOTUS next week. This post is about nothing other than itself. Tomorrow's post will concern a recent story involving physicist Andre Geim. The only other thing I want to say to you today is this: I'm curious about the whole "without wax" thing. There is a story about the etymology of the word "sincere". Something of an urban legend. I've discussed this in this blog before, though years back so I don't mind repeating myself. Medieval merch...
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Three days ago I mentioned an episode of The Jeffersons in which the etymology of the word "sincere" was discussed. I thought for a bit that I had tracked down the ep and that it was Season 2, Episode 4, "Harry and Daphne," which aired on October 4, 1975. Alas, though, I had focused on the wrong culprit. Harry never there discusses Daphne's sincerity at all, and the only etymological discussion involves the name Keller (which we're told means "cellar," -- big whoop.) If any reader of this blog can help me identify the episode where Harry or someone else DOES discuss "sincerity," I will be grateful.
The word sincere certainly looks like it could have come from the expression "without wax," or sine cero in Latin. My understanding is that this was a folk etymology which serious scholars dispute, but it had a venerable history to it even before Lionel Trilling cited it in a 1971 book on the development of the ideas of sincerity and authenticity. Trilling said that this fanciful etymology serves a purpose to remind us that the adjective described materials before it came to describe people -- materials that were in fact what they were sold as. There's an episode of the television show THE JEFFERSONS, made not long after the publication of Trilling's book, in which the word "sincere" is expounded by one of the characters in this way. As I remember the sitcom episode, the word began with medieval apple merchants who would hide the flaws in their product by the astute application of patches of wax -- red wax, presumably. Skeptical buye...