Fontana Books; Excerpt from page 23.

“For language, as Richard Trench pointed out long ago, is often ‘wiser, not merely than the vulgar, but even than the wisest of those who speak it. Sometimes it locks up truths which were once well known, but have been forgotten. In other cases it holds the germs of truths which, though they were never plainly descerned, the genius of its framers caught a glimpse of in a happy moment of divination.’ For example, how significant it is that in the Indo-European languages, as Darmsteter has pointed out, the root meaning ‘two’ should connote badness. The Greek prefix dys- (as in dyspepsia) and the Latin dis- (as in dishonorable) are both derived from ‘duo.’ The cognate bis- gives a pejorative sense to such modern French words as bevue (’blunder,’ literally ‘two-sighted’). Traces of that ’second which leads you astray’ can be found in ‘dubious,’ ‘doubt’ and Zweifel–for to doubt is to be double-minded. Bunyan has his Mr. Facing-both-ways, and modern American slang its ‘two-timers.’ Obscurely and unconsciously wise, our language confirms the findings of the mystics and proclaims the essential badness of division–a word, incidentally, in which our old enemy ‘two’ makes another decisive appearance.”

The genius of Aldous Huxley knows no bounds. This is a very shrewd commentary of the etymology of the word ‘two.’ Think of how little we think about the word two on a daily basis. It practically has no meaning until you start to travel down the rabbit hole a bit deeper. This just goes to show how much simplicity used to be esteemed. As a student of Anthropology, it’s easy to look at ‘less-developed’ civilizations and think of them as behind. The truth couldn’t be any more different to me. I tend to see these civilizations as ahead of us in many ways–who have no need for the social institutions of the ‘more-developed’ world. Who is really ahead?

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