Don't Start With Me

I'm late in getting started on this blog, since it's Monday. So what better good words to look at than words referring to starting. Now, start has several meanings, and the one I'm writing about is begin, not the one where you jump when surprised.

Let's consider four good words for start, and their differences help us put them in chronological order of "startedness". (My use of such a poorly constructed word should establish me as a student of words rather than a grammarian or word policeman. Nascence or inchoateness would be better.)

Incipient (soft c - sounds like an s) means to begin, or to take up. It goes back to 1669, and comes to us from Latin. Incipit is the first word in a Latin text, and literally means "here begins", so incipient is our starting word for starting.

Our next word is liminal. It is the adjective form of the word limen, which comes directly from the Latin word limen, which is the word for threshold. While limen gets into my dictionary, it is even more rarely used in English than liminal. (The most common English word from this root is subliminal, which technically means below the threshold.) But for our usage chronology it is when you've arrived at the threshold of something. I put that a little later than incipient, but wouldn't argue if you say they're synonymous. If you did, I might argue the former is for use in communication and the latter in movement.

Inchoate (our third word, with three syllables: in-koe-it) has an agricultural etymology. It comes from the Latin word cohum, which was the strap that was fastened to the oxen's yoke. Since to begin farming you used to have to hitch up the oxen as a first step, this came (by at least 1534) to mean that you've started, but haven't gotten far (or anywhere). Or are in the process of starting.

An interesting sidelight of inchoate is a blog written just last month (http://abluteau.wordpress.com/2010/01/12/choate/) making reference to an excoriation (see last blog of mine) of a lawyer using this phrase by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. As the other blog recounts, this has become a standard English legal term even though it's a back-formation and as such is looked down upon by some. (The blog also quotes Scalia as referring to backformation of insult to sult and P.G. Wodehouse's backformation gruntled - see my very first blog from December 26.)

Finally, nascent (ignore the c in pronouncing it) came to English in 1624 from the Latin word nasci, which means "to be born". Nascent is to any idea, plan, or activity what a baby is to pregnancy. When an idea is formed, but not fully grown, it is nascent. When a plan has been begun but not put in place, it is nascent. If you've chosen up teams but haven't started the game, the game is nascent.

While I've tried to put these in some sense of chronological order, I won't be obdurate or adamantine about it, no matter what the title says.