Ideas to Inspire

Today, February 12, 2009 is the 200th birthday of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin, two of our greatest wordsmiths.

President Barack Obama is linked with Lincoln not only because under Lincoln’s presidency the slaves were emancipated, but because Obama, like Lincoln is a great rhetorical orator (persuader). Lincoln is remembered for his  phrases like “four score and seven years ago,” “the mystic chords of memory,” “the better angels of our nature,” and “with malice toward none.”

Darwin is not known for his oratory skill, but his contribution to our lexicon is astounding. His discoveries were so novel that he needed to create words to explain his findings. No doubt his most famous contribution to the lexicon is natural selection, a term that he first used in an 1857 letter before elaborating on the concept two years later in The Origin of Species. A related term often attributed to Darwin, survival of the fittest, was not actually his coinage: Herbert Spencer introduced the phrase in his 1864 Principles of Biology, a work that connected Darwin’s natural selection to Spencer’s economic theories. (Darwin himself borrowed the phrase back in the fifth edition of The Origin of Species, published in 1869.) Phylogeny, referring to the evolutionary development of a species or higher taxonomic group, was also a Darwinian neologism.

Other terms first recorded in Darwin’s work had to do with the mechanics of biological descent, such as the verbs interbreed and cross-fertilize. (Darwin wrote a whole treatise in 1876 on “the effects of cross and self-fertilisation in the vegetable kingdom.”) He was also the first to write in English about the archaeopteryx, a fossil find that helped bolster his evolutionary theories. (The paleontologist Christian Erich Hermann von Meyer is credited with introducing the Greek-derived term archaeopteryx first in German.)

Darwin imported many foreign words into English in his work as a naturalist. For instance, in his journal recording the famed voyage of the HMS Beagle, he wrote of alfalfa, a Spanish word that ultimately derives from Arabic and Persian. Even more surprisingly, Darwin was the first known English writer to use the Spanish word rodeo, which appeared in a Beagle journal entry after he observed a cattle round-up in central Chile.