Understand

Filed Under April 2007, columns 

… to do in a pigeon.

Dear Word Detective: I have a vague recollection from my high school days of one of my profs saying that the term “understanding” is derived from the Greek myth of Atlas, who was punished by being made to hold up the weight of the world on his shoulders, and in so doing heard all the many sufferings of humanity, i.e., he came to “understand” the world. Is that in fact the case, or have I (or my former prof) been misinformed? I have done some research, but have yet to find a resource to support the claim. — Stephen.

Nor are you likely to find one, at least not a credible resource. I’m afraid that your teacher was mistaken, probably repeating a story he had heard elsewhere, possibly one that has been passed around for many years. There is, unfortunately, no shortage of such colorful stories. English etymology, the investigation of word origins, is actually a relatively young science, and until the 19th century it was considered acceptable for dictionary editors and others in the field to simply take their best guesses at a word’s origin, inventing etymologies from whole cloth when necessary. Many of the etymologies found in Dr. Samuel Johnson’s groundbreaking 1755 “Dictionary of the English Language,” for instance, are little more than learned guesses.

But the story of Atlas that your teacher recounted does highlight the very real puzzle at the core of our English word “understand” — how did a word which appears to mean “stand beneath” or “support” come to mean “comprehend”?

The real answer is that the prefix “under” in “understand” is not our normal “beneath” kind of “under” as found in “underground” or “undermine.” The “under” in “understand,” although spelled just like the other “under,” comes from an entirely different Indo-European root word, one that carried the sense of “between or among.” When “understand” first appeared in Old English (as “understandan”), it carried the meaning of “comprehend, grasp the idea or details of something,” but literally meant “to stand among or amidst” something, and thereby be familiar with it.

One minor mystery is why the Old English “understandan” was carried over into our modern English while a more logical candidate, the Old English “forstand,” was not. “Forstand” meant literally “to stand before or on top of” and also carried the sense of “comprehend” (much as we say we are “on top of” a situation today). The answer is, as usual, that our modern English is the product of a committee consisting of many millions of people chattering away over the course of many centuries, and the result is often less than logical.

 

 

Comments

2 Responses to “Understand”

  1. marcparis on April 12th, 2007 4:08 pm

    So is the “under” in “understand” related to “inter”?

  2. bzurer on April 27th, 2007 7:33 pm

    Could it be that to really understand, one must put oneself in the same situation?
    “Before I judge a man, let me first walk a mile in his moccasins”

    To be “on top of” a situation seems to imply a certain kind of intellectual distance.

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