This week: People have been deriving medicines from trees and other plants for millennia. I just didn’t know we had so many words for it. Let’s get into it.
Decoction Invocation
Here in Japan, we’re in the middle third of the spring semester, which means that I1 have been putting off all the grading, test-making, and general student assessment that is the hallmark of modern teaching. And what have I been doing while so blatantly avoiding my responsibilities, you ask? Why continuing my love-hate affair with Tik Tok, of course.
I have managed, over the past year, to coerce and cajole the algorithm into providing me with a never-ending stream of serotonin, usually in the form of “competence porn2.” And, for me, that usually means watching people make cool stuff. Even better if it’s cool stuff that I think is fascinating to watch being made but that doesn’t trigger my “I have to try that” Hobby-Collecting3 Brain.
One of my current faves is a guy named Justin Davies, who works with wood and is currently engaged in making a map of the United States with each state carved out of its state tree (e.g. my home state of Arizona is carved out of Palo Verde wood). The resulting collage-in-progress is stunning as each state sits in beautiful contrast to the ones around it. But Davies isn’t content to merely make the states, he scripts his videos with a quick educational brief about the history of each tree, namely how it became a state tree, and what the native peoples in the area used it for. Recently, he added the state of North Dakota with its state tree, the American Elm. And, as part of his brief about the tree, he used a word I wasn’t familiar with.
Davies:
Traditional uses for the American Elm primarily include decoctions made from its inner bark, which can treat coughs, colds, cramps, and more.
Now, my first thought was to wonder if I had misheard and that he had used the more familiar (to me, at least) “concoction.” But, when I listened again, I decided that I had heard correctly and off to the books I went. So, first and foremost, our beloved Merriam-Webster:
1: an extract obtained by decocting
2: the act or process of decocting
Oh, Merriam and Webster, you scamps, I do love it when you use a different form of a word to define the word I’m looking up. Fine, fine, what’s decoct then?
1: to extract the flavor of by boiling
2: boil down, concentrate
Well, that makes perfect sense. But the dictionary isn’t done with its entry on decoct just yet. It continues the definition with a “Did You Know” section that gives us a couple of interesting facts, including…
Decoct boils down to a simple Latin origin: the word decoquere, from de-, meaning "down" or "away," and coquere, meaning "to cook" or "to ripen."
and
Decoct itself is somewhat rare.
Taking the second point first, this is a bit of an understatement. Looking at the Google Ngram for decoct shows that it was a much more popular word in the 1800s, being mainly found in medical journals. As medicine grew as a field, the use of decoctions lessened and, as a result, by the middle of the twentieth century, the word itself had fallen almost entirely out of use. Until recently, that is, when a certain pandemic brought it back to the masses.
Searching for decoct in the NOW4 corpus doesn’t bring back many results. But, what they do bring back is telling. A January 2020 Globe and Maile article called “At the epicentre of the coronavirus outbreak, Western medicine meets traditional Chinese remedies,” contains this passage:
Last Thursday, doctors at the Hubei Provincial Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine released a pair of “formulas for pneumonia prevention.” The recommended formulas clear away heat, detoxify, dry dampness, moisten and enhance physical immunity, Yang Yi, a senior Chinese medicine practitioner, told state media. “Citizens can decoct at home to prevent the disease,” the state-run People’s Daily reported.
Now, I find this fascinating not least for what we know now about the disease-that-shall-not-be-named and how to prevent it, but more so for the association between decoct and traditional medicine. Traditional medicines are still very much in demand in many parts of Asia5 and the idea of making your own remedies at home is common. That said, I can’t help but wonder if this is a translation issue.
It’s not uncommon, when translating between languages, to pull up a word in the dictionary that seems to match exactly what you’re trying to express only to later learn that it is far from common. And my guess would be that that is what has happened here. Someone assigned to translate the Chinese medicine practitioner’s words into English found the perfect word without realizing that it is in far from common use.
But, back to the origins of the word decoct. As noted above, it’s from the Latin coquere. And there are a lot of English words that come, more or less directly, from the same verb. Most notable of these is concoct, which is built from the past-participle of coquere and stitched together with con (meaning “with”), and which originally meant “to digest” instead of the more common “to create from different parts” as it is used today.
Down the Rabbit Hole:
It’s a short rabbit hole this week, but, since we’re talking, however obliquely, about cooking, here’s an interesting bit from Daily Kos that details where a bunch of cooking words come from: English Word History and Cookery. I don’t know that I would take this article as gospel, but it’s a good starting point for several interesting words including pie and pan.
Once you’ve made it through those, maybe try this list from Fluent U that is less about where words come from and is more about which words you can use in two languages (English and French): 60+ French Cognates You Can Count On (Plus Fake Ones You Can’t).
From the Archives:
It’s been a minute since I went back to the very beginning of the newsletter. So, here’s the issue from the week of May 23, 2018: Learned Volume 1, Issue 8: Annotated, which was all about how to take notes. More importantly, I used it to let readers know about the apps I use to take notes…actually there’s a lot of good stuff in that issue - I talk about how I take notes using a computer language called Markup, I show an example of my hand-written notes, and I recommend a book about journaling (that I still reference and use and love) and several articles about why writing by hand is better than typing. You should go read it.
Along with every other teacher you know.
Speaking of algorithms, I’m hoping that by sticking the phrase in quotes, Google’s spiders will only bring in readers looking for the phrase and not the latter word all on its own. We’ll see how this works.
Hobby-Collecting Brain is closely related to Fear Of Missing Out and is directly responsible for me having tried snowboarding, painting, SCUBA diving, water-skiing, and baking amongst many, many others. While it is usually experientially rewarding, it is fiscally damning.
15.2 billion+ words from 20 countries, compiled circa 2010-yesterday
Here in Japan, doctors routinely prescribe packets of powders called “kanpo,” which translates directly as “Chinese medicine” and which is, depending on who you ask, an effective remedy for a whole host of aches and pains, or total bullshit. I tend to fall into the latter camp.