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Posted by Danny on Monday, March 2, 2009 at 2:37 pm

I am subject to a socially-debilitating frisson whereby my inner narrative slows and distends: queued sentences fall into clauses, then words, then morphemes, and then sometimes, constituent letters (though this last happens with increasing scarcity as the incursion of spell-checking software further and further into my patterns of composition is eroding my orthographical confidence). The outward manifestation of this phenomenon is that I have lost my train of thought, perhaps because I have been speaking ex-proctologically (this is not always never the case), but witnesses concerned for my cognitive acuity and fitness may be cheerfully reassured that I am even then merely in the throes of a kind of lexophilic masturbation which involves them only peripherally at best. My frisson culminates in the spontaneous synthesis of long forgotten, or at least hitherto dissociated, etymological data into a personally novel insight regarding the use, significance, and varying aptness of a commonly invoked word I had been presently planning to deploy. Naturally, by the time I have sanitised and condensed my epiphany into a generally edible product, its sovereign relevance to the conversation has waned and I wind up looking like a weirdo.

It’s a savoury kindness to one with this condition that his friends and family often indulge it for minutes at a time, and even condescend occasionally to offer up their own etymological morsels for his ravenous delight. Recently, Ksenija encountered the word “orthodoxy” thus incised and arrayed, and challenged me to reproduce its dissection.

I have no formal training in Greek or Latin, so the word roots I’ve collected come largely from previous comparisons of cognate English words (and whatever French vocabulary remains after I stopped taking it at the end of Grade Eleven). Consequently, these exercises involve a cascade of loose associations and watery (again) ex-proctological assertions:

“I’ve associated ‘orthodoxy’ with tradition, in so far as ‘heterodoxy’ means ‘outside of a tradition,’ or ‘many traditions.’”

“Okay…”

“Dox… doxy… doctrine! Teaching!”

“Yes.”

“Okay. ‘Ortho-’ I wear orthotics—”

“Yes! Good—”

“So ‘orthodoxy’ … how about ‘comfortable teaching?’”

“Oh, no. But, that’s funny though. You perceive the purpose of your orthotics to be to make your feet more comfortable.”

“Yes.”

“But what are they actually doing? Or at least, supposedly?”

“They’re a corrective prosthesis for my feet. So, ‘orthodoxy’—‘correct teaching?’”

“Close enough. They’re supposed to straighten your feet. So, orthodoxy means ‘straight teaching.’”

This gives me pleasure, dammit. I’ve been sucking on that conversation now for a couple of weeks and the flavour hasn’t gone from it yet.

“Ergonomics” is the study of comfort—or at least, it has come to be connoted thus [“connote,” as in the conning of a cognitive ship through a sea of meanings? Yum—somebody should look that up], but originally it seems to have meant “the scientific study of the efficiency of man in his working environment”[1]. That “work” is also, I suspect, laden and straining beneath its scientific association with energy, “erg” being “a unit of work or energy; the amount of work done when a force of one dyne [hence dynamic and dynamism] moves its point of application one centimetre in the direction of the force”[2]. We have moved to our vernacular usage of “ergonomic,” I suspect, as a result of this progression: from the broad concept of the efficient marshalling or ergs, to the application of that marshalling specific to human beings (whence the Ergonomics Research Society was founded in 1950, coining the term as far as I can tell[3]), to the association of efficient energy use while toil with ease while toiling, to the association of ease with comfort. Thus, an ergonomic chair is ostensibly a chair with a design prioritising comfort (over æstheticism, perhaps), but is actually a chair designed to make the process of sitting as calorically efficient as possible (the act of sitting consumes significantly more energy than lying down, as any good nutritionist or lapsed fitness enthusiast will readily avow).

I found myself thus discursing, and have subsequently discursed at you, patient reader, because I rather like having a handle for the idea of a “comfortable or comforting teaching or teacher,” and would in ignorance of any extant such handle, like to mint a family of words around “ergodoxy.” Where a doctrine or teacher’s object is to instil satisfaction, pleasure, or complacency, where the struggle for a mastery of knowledge comprised of rigorously inclusive, harmonic, and consistent data is abandoned in favour of truisms and axioms which decline more than cursory scrutiny, where the asymptotic pursuit of Truth is subordinated (yea, suborned) to the acknowledgement of “true enough for me,” there is ergodoxy.

It is my enemy.

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