A word older than wheels

Reflection

The wheel was invented, as far as we know, around 3500 BCE, in Mesopotamia. The word wierk was already old. Its ancestor, the Proto-Indo-European root *werǵ-, was spoken on the Pontic steppe before anyone had thought to put something round under a weight. When a thing as useful as a wheel was new, the word for a thing done, a thing made was already ordinary.

I find this difficult to keep in my mind. Five thousand years is a long time. The word has survived the invention of the wheel, of writing, of the city, of the plough, of the printing press, of the electric light, of the internet. It has passed through mouths that ground grain by hand and mouths that send messages at the speed of light. The sounds have changed; the meaning has narrowed in places and widened in others; but the word, in some sense, is the same word.

A website is not a place where this kind of time is usually present. A website is rewritten every year, redesigned every three, replaced every seven. The temporal horizon of a domain is, in practice, short: long enough for the lease to expire, no longer. Most domains were registered in the last ten years. Most will be gone in the next ten. The material is perishable.

This is the first thing I want to say. The decision to devote a website to a word is — if the devotion is real — a decision to make a perishable artifact align itself, for as long as it can, with an imperishable one. The word outlasts the page by every order of magnitude you can think of. The page will be gone within a human lifetime, almost certainly. The word will still be here.

The ratio

I like to do the arithmetic sometimes. The Proto-Indo-European speakers who used the word *werǵ- lived perhaps five thousand years ago. A generation is roughly twenty-five years. Five thousand divided by twenty-five is two hundred generations. Two hundred people, in a line, each of them receiving the word from a parent and passing it to a child, have carried this word to today. If you were to take the hand of the Luxembourgish speaker who tells you E grousst Wierk — "a great work" — and they took the hand of their mother, and she took the hand of her mother, and so on, you could reach the ancestor who invented the word in two hundred handshakes.

This is not a large number. It is the number of people you pass on a busy afternoon in a European capital. The genealogical distance to the first speaker of wierk is walkable in a single street.

Meanwhile the material from which those people built their lives — the tools, the houses, the crops, the gods — is almost entirely gone. We know there was something like a horse culture. We suspect a funerary practice. The rest is reconstruction from fragments. The one thing that survives in legible, usable form, five thousand years later, is the vocabulary. Words last longer than things.

The index

This is the second thing. I used to think of language as a tool — something we use to describe a reality that exists independently of it. The longer I look at etymologies, the less I can hold this view. The words are the index of what people cared about enough to keep saying. They are a catalogue, maintained across millennia, of the concepts a species found indispensable.

That wierk and its cousins — work, Werk, verk, weorc, ergon — have survived in every Indo-European daughter is evidence that the concept of a made thing has been indispensable to every human community that has used these languages. Not the concept of labor, not the concept of tool-use, but the specific concept that there are things that have been made, as opposed to things that have simply happened. This distinction — between the natural and the artifactual — is apparently as ancient as Indo-European speech.

When I read the cognate list, I am reading a continuous chain of cultures, each of them needing the same word for the same reason. Every community that has spoken an Indo-European language has had a specific word for the made thing, distinct from the word for the natural thing. This is a fact about human cognition, deposited in the lexicon. The word has survived because the distinction has been, in every generation, too important to lose.

The stewardship

The third thing is about stewardship. A website devoted to a single word cannot produce the word. The word existed for five thousand years before the site, and will exist for some indefinite time after. What the site can do is something smaller, and, in a way, more precise: it can keep the word visible. It can be the place where a person who types wierk into a search bar is met with a careful, accurate, non-corrosive account of what the word is and where it came from.

This is not a large ambition, and I think that is what I like about it. Most of what the internet wants me to do is larger: produce content, optimize, expand, grow. The ambition here is to tend. To make sure that when someone turns their attention, for a moment, toward this word, they find something worth the turn. To make the internet, in this one tiny place, accountable to a thing older than it is.

There is an old meaning of the English verb to keep that overlaps almost exactly with this. To keep a word — not in the modern sense of keeping a promise, though that is adjacent — but in the sense of guardianship, of maintenance, of watch. A word needs very little. It needs to be said, occasionally. It needs not to be misspelled into oblivion. It needs, in the age of search engines, to be locatable by people who want to find it. The rest is beyond our ability to influence.

The strange company

The fourth thing, which is the one I keep coming back to, is that a word like wierk is in strange company. Its cousins are all over modern English, invisible unless you look. The urgy in liturgy and dramaturgy and metallurgy is the same Greek form of the same root. So is the -ergic in allergic, and the -ergy in energy, and the organ of organic. The Greek ergon and the Germanic wierk are cognates. When a surgeon operates, they are doing cheirourgia, hand-work, the same work the Luxembourgish grandmother means when she says Handwierk, hand-work, of a piece of knitting. The word crosses the operating theater and the kitchen table without losing itself.

Modern English has other cousins that have wandered so far from the family home that they no longer recognize each other. George — the name — is gē-ergos, the earth-worker, the farmer. Every Saint George is, etymologically, a Saint Farmer. The ancient aristocratic name conceals the occupation of almost every human who has ever lived. And energy — what we spend on lights, on engines, on nations at war — is the same word, through Greek, as the Luxembourgish noun for a knitted scarf, a poem, a steelworks, an opera.

The strangest member of the family is Proto-Celtic *wergā, which meant anger. The same root that gave wierk its sense of productive making gave Celtic speakers a word for the opposite — exertion turned destructive, labor curdled into rage. Greek orgē followed the same path. So wierk and wrath are distant cousins. Work and anger are the same human capacity, forked.

What the site is for

This site exists because I find all of the above deeply interesting, and because there is no single place on the internet where it is collected. There are dictionary entries, Wiktionary citations, scattered academic papers, the Stanford Encyclopedia. None of them tell the whole story. None of them sit on a domain named, in its entirety, after the subject. None of them treat the word as a thing worth keeping for its own sake.

That is the ambition. To be the place on the internet where this particular word is kept. To be findable, to be correct, to be pleasing to read, to stay. In the long run, to outlast the fashion that built it. In the short run, to be useful to the few people who, for their own reasons, are looking for wierk.

A word older than wheels deserves, I think, at minimum, one careful page.