Senior managing editor and logophile Andy Hollandbeck reveals the sometimes surprising roots of common English words and phrases. Remember: Etymology tells us where a word comes from, but not what it means today.
Though the cardiocentric hypothesis is ancient, I only recently learned that it had its own name. Etymologically, the word cardiocentric breaks down pretty easily: cardio (from Greek kardia) means the heart, and centric means “at the center.” According to the cardiocentric hypothesis, one’s heart is the primary location for emotion, cognition, and awareness.
The hypothesis wasn’t universally accepted: Aristotle and Democritus, for example, were cardiocentrists, while Plato, Pythagoras, and others favored the cephalocentric (that is, brain-centered) hypothesis.
The key bit of information for today’s column, though, is the idea of the heart being the organ for cognition, a concept which still echoes in a few English idioms. For example, if someone changes their mind about an issue, they might also be said to have had a change of heart. And memorization of, say, a piece of music or a poem might be referred to as learning it by heart.
This latter idea, connecting the heart to memory, is well-hidden in another English word. The Latin word for “heart” is cor, and it is probably from this metaphoric sense of the heart as the seat of memory that led to the Latin verb recordari “to remember, to think over” — using the re- prefix.
By the time the word reached Old French as recorder, it meant not just to recall but to share that recollection — that is, to repeat, recite, or make known to others. When the word recorden found its way into Middle English, by the 14th century, it brought with it the sense of “to recall,” but also “to repeat, rehearse.”
Of course, if something is really worth remembering, instead of relying on your gray matter, you write it down. In the legal field, when a witness recorded (that is, recalled memories and repeated them) testimony to the court, that record would be written down. It’s from this sense, appearing in legal documents around 1300, that we get the noun form of record.
Over time, recording became all about creating physical media — first putting words and pictures on paper, then in the 19th century using wax and vinyl to preserve sounds. Today we’ve got court records, academic records, sports records (especially the extreme and unique statistics), and voting records, and people are recording memoirs, videos, and music. The early sense of simply remembering something is obsolete; now we record things so we don’t have to remember them.
I noted earlier that, in the 14th century, recorden had also begun taking on the sense of “to repeat or rehearse.” This sense of the verb record had a longer life among bird-watchers, or more specifically bird-listeners. Birdcalls tend to be repeated over and over again, and younger birds — not yet ready for mating — have been known to “practice” their species’ songs before they reach maturity. This sort of practicing or repetition was known among bird-watchers as recording. It’s probably from a connection to this sense that a musical wind instrument got the name recorder, because it can mimic birdsong.
The recorder as an instrument was almost completely overtaken by developments to the transverse flute (held at a right angle to the body rather than in line with it) during the 18th century. The recorder had nearly died out by the end of the 19th century but made a comeback in the 20th. Today, the two places you’re most likely to find recorders are in Baroque ensembles and elementary school classrooms.
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