On 30th July 1763, James Boswell took a boat down the Thames with Samuel Johnson.
Boswell asked the great man if knowing Greek and Latin was ‘necessary’. Johnson had no doubt, replying, ‘By all means; for they who know them have a very great advantage over those who do not.’
Late in life I became a history teacher and found myself in a girls’ grammar school, where I lasted for nine years.
I was once standing in a classroom while two girls were puzzling over the knotty word ‘osmosis’ in their GCSE biology homework. They’d completely forgotten what it meant, probably because they had never understood in the first place why it means what it does.
So I told them. Incredulous, one said, ‘How could you possibly know that? You’re a history teacher.’
It was my first lesson in discovering the totally fragmented curriculum. It has the extraordinary power to prevent children from having the slightest awareness that their subjects might be connected, or what the words they are taught mean.
Osmosis is the spontaneous movement of molecules through a membrane. It comes from the Greek ōsmós – ‘push’.
Unfortunately, denied a classical education in any form, students like them tramp through long school days bombarded with words containing syllables and structures they do not recognise or understand. No wonder they spend half their time in a disconnected daze.
Back in the days of the Enlightenment, scholars across Europe coined scientific terms mainly from Latin and Greek, creating a lingua franca so they could all understand one another. Now those languages have disappeared from school, the words might as well be Chinese, even though the vast majority have fabulously basic meanings.
I bought my own copy of the chemistry A-level textbook (in which the etymology is wholly omitted) and started annotating it. Not one student knew what a single term literally meant. They tussled with ‘isotopes’ – the word merely means ‘same (or equal) place’ (from isos and topos). Differentiating isotopes from one another is simply a way of distinguishing atoms of the same element that have different numbers of neutrons. Consequently, they end up in the ‘same place’ on the periodic table.
The pupils might, just possibly, transfer their new-found wisdom to ‘topography’ – writing about places – while studying ‘geography’ – writing about the Earth. A student could make a stab at ‘isomers’. Isomers (‘equal shares’ from isos and meros, ‘a share’) are molecules that have the same formula – but the atoms of which they have an equal share are in a different arrangement. ‘Molecule’ is the diminutive of the Latin moles ‘mass’ – therefore ‘a very small mass’.
An atom (a-temein, something that is ‘not divisible’), has the same number of protons as electrons and is therefore electrically neutral. An ion of the same element has one or more additional electrons, giving it a negative charge, which means it’s attracted to protons which are positively charged. Origin? The Greek iōn, which just means ‘going’ – literally it is in a state of motion.
‘Proton’ was taken from the Greek prōtos (‘first’) by Ernest Rutherford. He had identified these subatomic particles in the nucleus (from the Latin nux for a little nut) of an atom of hydrogen (from two Greek words meaning ‘produces water’) – and therefore they were a primary building block of matter.
My favourite is stoichiometry – measuring the ratios of reactants (ie elements) reacting and what they produce. Stoikeion is the Greek for an element, and -metry comes from metrēs, ‘a measurer’.
It’s handy to know, too, about the Roman provinces of Transalpine and Cisalpine Gaul. Trans- means simply ‘on the other side of’, and cis- ‘on this side of’: Cisalpine was ‘on this [ie the Italian] side of Gaul’ and Transalpine Gaul was on the other side. By some tortuous route, ‘cis-’ has now come to mean still going by one’s gender at birth and ‘trans-’ the opposite.
The point is not to have children laboriously translating Homer or Virgil, but to give them half a chance of understanding what they’re doing. Spending their days confronted with terminology based on what were and still are foreign and ancient languages, they’re bound to be disengaged.
Most teachers are now young enough to have missed out on a classical education. Not only did none of my students’ science teachers know what these words mean, but also they had never even contemplated finding out.
Even Wackford Squeers, the wicked schoolmaster in Nicholas Nickleby, was an improvement: ‘A horse is a quadruped, and quadruped’s Latin for beast [actually quadrupes], as everybody that’s gone through the grammar knows, or else where’s the use of having grammars at all?’
