Words That Mean Only Themselves: Asbestos

This is the first installment in what I hope shall become an intermittent series for this blog. The title refers to that class of words which both have a very tightly circumscribed meaning, and have been brought into English from other languages. Such words do not present the English speaker with their component parts, but rather arrive as a single unit, and therefore, to the uneducated take on a sort of mystical status in their meanings.

Take for example, the words ‘stance’ and ‘standing;’ both are formed in the same way from the verbs (identical in basic meaning) stare and stand, respectively. However, since ‘stance’ is a word adapted to English use from Latin (through Italian and French), the presence of this link in meaning to the whole system of ‘stand’ words is not as obvious as it is in ‘standing,’ which is an English word. ‘Stance’ and words like it are as slippery as they are untethered: we cannot grasp them because their meanings are so inflexible and fixed and we cannot identify their place within the bounds of our language because they did not spring out of it; they have only specific and complex meanings, and not simple or intuitive ones, because they are not native to English, and therefore must always exist, to some degree, as jargon. For these reasons I have identified them in the title of this post as meaning only themselves. I hope I will not be alone in finding it a fascinating and edifying task to uncover the etymology of such words.

I encountered today’s word, asbestos, in reading the Gospel of Matthew, 3:12, where the chaff will be burnt πυρι ασβεστω, with unquenchable fire. The Greek ασβεστος is formed from the root of the verb σβεννυμι, quench, and the Greek equivalent of un-, what grammarians call the Alpha Privative, or “The A That Takes Away,” which English speakers will be familiar with from words like 'atypical.' It therefore means, quite simply, unquenchable (Liddell and Scott says “of fire and laughter etc”). The modern meaning that you’ll find in the dictionary is derived from its application to certain minerals. Yet because of popular knowledge of the dangerous effects of those minerals, asbestos has come, in colloquial language, to be almost exclusively associated with poisoning, a turn which seems unfortunate for what was once such a fine poetic word in its original tongue: my Greek lexicon cites a beautiful phrase of Aeschylus, ασβεστος πορος οκεανου, “Ocean’s inextinguishable passage.”