Business
This word is almost too depressing to parse. I’d go as far as to say it’s among the saddest words in the English language for what it reveals about many of us as human beings. Literally “busy” plus the suffix “ness”, which denotes a state of being, business just means being busy. Now, while there’s nothing inherently upsetting about this, things start to get dire when we consider what sort of things our society considers worthwhile getting busy with. To keep it brief, “business” on the whole tends to have some sort of relationship with money-making. Indeed, the more money one makes, the “bigger” your “business”. It is so important to be good at being busy that “business” in our society is considered a profession (“businessman/woman”), and something you can get a (very expensive) degree in (an MBA, a Masters of Business Administration). The acme of absurdity, however, is that in order to get an MBA and become a professional busy person, one goes to: Business School. Dear readers: “Business School” is a profound oxymoron. “Business” is the English equivalent of the Latin negotium (whence ‘negotiation’: deals, dealing etc.) Negotium is in turn the negative of otium, which meant precisely leisure time, free time. Over the centuries the word otium has yielded us ‘otiose’, meaning leisurely to point of decadent, but this is not what it originally meant. Otium was the Latin equivalent of the Ancient Greek, σχολή (skholḗ), meaning “spare time, leisure”, and where we get the word ‘school’, through the Latin schola. (It is curious to note that philologists conjecture a Proto-Indo-European root, *seǵʰ-, meaning “to hold, have, possess”). Here we have the bones of an etymological demonstration showing that the opposite of “businessperson” is in fact “scholar”. The former is as profoundly unfree as the latter is, by definition, free. (See also “liberal arts”, i.e. disciplines befitting the free person, disciplines for freedom ).
Science
We had this one before, and we’ll probably keep having it on here, because the word is in terrible trouble. We have forgotten so much. And to forget the meaning of the word “science”, which etymologically means “knowing”, is a potent symbol of our age of industrial amnesia. Nowadays it is common to pit science against the arts or humanities, but the word and the worldview it encodes actually emerged in opposition to the dogmatism of early modern philosophy, which was synonymous with Aristotelianism. Aristotelianism was a rigid and totalitarian logical schema considered capable of explaining the causes of anything and everything in existence. In practice, of course, this meant anything and everything that humans were able to observe. This all changed when Galileo pointed a telescope at the sky and saw mountains on the moon. This upset the core Aristotelian tenet that the moon (and all extraterrestrial bodies) had to be perfectly spherical (which with hindsight sounds like an absurd stipulation, but trust me it made rather compelling sense at the time). The point of this anecdote is to highlight that, if science has to be understood as the opposite of anything, it is the opposite of dogmatism, wherever it raises its head. Today, totalitarian doctrines such as behaviourism, neoliberalism, white supremacism, any number of nationalisms, etc. - “philosophies” which claim to explain reality, are our modern day Aristotelianisms, so many petty teleologies to lull a frightened mind to sleep. More than ever we must point our telescopes to the skies and cut through these clouds of unknowing.
Management
“To manage” means of course “to get by”, “to scrape by” (“How are you doing money-wise?” “Oh, you know, I manage”), or “to achieve with difficulty” (“Today I managed to get out of bed before midday”). A “manager” is thus one to be pitied, as one who is forever just scraping by. “Management” is the art and science of scraping by. In our meritocratic society, these “managers” are among the most celebrated members, and are often richly rewarded for the terrific effort they expend in scraping by with the least possible knowledge, effort, or skill.
Public
“Public” is a hard word because we are rapidly losing any familiarity with a landscape in which it has meaning. The root of “public” is the same as “people”, and refers to the sphere which belongs to the community (in Latin the res publica, or republic). Today however we are disinclined to imagine ownership as anything other than private, solemnized by the symbolic transaction of fiat currency (i.e. paying for something). It is interesting to note that the conjectural root of “public” is the word *poplos in proto-Italic (one of the ancient languages in Italy before Latin), which is believed to have meant “army”. Today’s public needs to remember this old strength. But it is difficult. Everything conspires against such a reprise de conscience, and it may be that all we can do is wait for an eventual act of involuntary memory, triggered by who knows what strange concatenation.
