Peripatetic Mix-up, Again
Learned Vol. 5, Issue 1, Redux
Welcome back to the Redux series of Learned where I revisit the first issue of each previous volume and re-publish it with some additional commentary. Today, we’re up to Volume 5, Issue 1 and it’s one of my favorites for two reasons: one, I feel like this is where the modern era of Learned really begins, and two, as difficult as they were to make, I enjoyed being a “cartoonist” during this year and coming up with a weekly one-panel comic mostly related to the topic.
This volume also saw the introduction of proper footnotes (yeah!) and a lot more community interaction. This came about directly because of SubStack’s efforts to foster community through creating group-sharing opportunities, recommendations, and categories that let creators with similar content find each other.
In my case, I found a group of like-minded individuals with whom I am still in regular contact and who I consider close friends three years later. Sometimes, things are good. On to the issue itself!
This week: New year, new Learned! Wait, what? Don’t worry, all will be explained. But first, ever hear a word and think it was a word you knew only to find that it was, in fact, a totally different word? No? Oh. Uh, me neither. Anyway, on with the show!
Say It Again, But Slowly
With Rivers of London (retitled Midnight Riot in the U.S.) Ben Aaronovitch gave us the best take on British wizardry since Harry Potter1 in the form of Peter Grant, police officer, apprentice wizard, and general go-to for the rest of British law enforcement when things get weird. And things do get weird. Author Aaronovitch has put his characters up against rogue magicians, the fae, a couple of ghosts, and even a deranged god, give or take a few chapters. But, the series is best known for the namesake rivers of London, each of whom comes with its own goddess, thereby taking the idiom of making the city a character to its logical conclusion. In other words, they’re fun books. I like them.
2025 me: I did really enjoy beginning each issue with a quote. Unfortunately, sourcing a quote that is appropriate, or, in this case, from where the content is derived takes a lot of time. By about halfway through this volume I had picked up some extra classes and finding the time to write the newsletter while maintaining a full teaching schedule almost got the better of me. Foreshadowing, by halfway through the next volume, it did get the better of me and I broke my weekly streak for the first time.
But let’s talk about that quote2 up there. One reason I enjoy this series so much is that Aaronovitch has a habit of catching me off my guard and forcing me to re-evaluate words I thought I knew. And one reason I like them is that they challenge my vocabulary. In this case, I thought I knew the word ‘peripatetic.’ But the word I knew, or thought I did, doesn’t make any sense in the joke, no matter how hard I try to squeeze it in. So, it’s off to the dictionary we go:
From the New Oxford American Dictionary:
traveling from place to place, especially working or based in various places for relatively short periods
Huh. That literally describes my job. You would think I would know this word. And, I thought I did. Only, I thought it meant something along the lines of shrewd or cunning. To the thesaurus! “Shrewd” led me to a handful of entries, which I could narrow down to those that started with “per,” the idea being that since I was confused about peripatetic I could eliminate any words that didn’t bear any resemblance to it. As word-finding methodologies go, this one less than perfect, but it worked out anyway. There, in my list of results was “perspicacious.”
of acute mental vision or discernment
Huh. Well. Those are not the same at all. But I wanted to dive a little deeper. Namely, I wanted to know two things: are these two words related? And, how did I mix them up so badly?
The tone of this issue and this volume has shifted slightly. I consciously tried to move from professorial, “I’m the expert” to more conversational, “I’m a learner, too.” I think it was successful.
Let’s talk about the elephant in the room, er, comic. I say comic but, obviously, I didn’t draw this illustrations. Instead, they’re much more like digital collages. I pulled a few source images from different collections and then layered them in over that blue background. Over the course of the volume, it got easier and I responded by upping the challenge and making the later ones in the series much more visually interesting. What I didn’t expect was that the different animals, especially these three, would develop distinct personalities with different levels of snark and empathy. I enjoyed making these comics and, looking back on them now, they’re much funnier than I remembered. To me, at least.
Etymology
Peripatetic is one of those words that seems to exist just for word nerds. The first entry in the dictionary is all about moving around, but the second entry (again from New Oxford) is one word: Aristotelian. As in Aristotle. That’s a bit of a jump, isn’t it? Well, not if you’re familiar with Aristotle’s practice of teaching on the hoof. As Word Origins The Hidden Histories of English Words from A to Z puts it:
the Greeks used it not simply for ‘walk around’, but specifically for ‘teach while walking around’ – an allusion to the teaching methods of Aristotle, who discussed and argued with his pupils and followers while walking about in the Lyceum
So here you have this grandiose, overly fancy word for itinerant that ties directly back to the father of modern philosophy (Greek to Latin to Old French to, finally, English in the 1600s for those taking notes) that has everything to do with a walk-and-talk to make Aaron Sorkin envious and nothing to do with being shrewd.
Perspicacious, as Etymoline tells us, appears at first to have some similar characteristics as it also comes from the 1600s and Latin. However, once we look past those coincidences, we see that the initial root comes from PIE and, most tellingly, stems from the root “per” meaning “through” and “spek” meaning “observe,” whereas the “per” in peripatetic is actually the Greek “peri” meaning “round” and “patein” which means “walk.”
One thing I’m quite happy with in this volume is that the quality of research went up a level. I had gone on a hunt for some tools to help explain the etymology of different words and found some good ones. I’ve read through the other issues in this volume and everything holds up. Good job, me!
Mix-Ups
Amazon gets vilified a lot these days and for pretty justifiable reasons. However, to give credit where it is due, I don’t think people have really come to grasp with just how much they have revolutionized reading as a pastime for many people through their Kindle devices and service. Besides the physical ease of reading multiple books for long periods, the fact that they have incorporated dictionary services into their ebook software is, by itself, a game changer. Don’t know a word? Simply tap on it and there’s the dictionary entry, no muss, no fuss.
Contrast this to when I was a young reader - seeing a word I didn’t know meant having to either stop where I was, find a way to mark my place in the book, go down the hall to my dad’s home-office, get the dictionary down off the shelf, find the word in question, read the (sometimes oblique) definition, then go back to my book and try to get back into the flow of the story Or, I could just skip it and carry on reading. Guess which one I did?
Now, on the face of it, I don’t think that guessing the meanings of words from context and just getting on with the story is a bad thing. In fact, it’s how those of us of a certain age were taught to read. We spent a lot of time with worksheets designed to get us to figure a word out from the way it was used and by what the words around it meant. And that is a very valuable skill. But it can also make us a little lax when it comes to making sure we really know the words we think we know.
So, all I can surmise is that somewhere along the way, I came across perspicacious, guessed what it meant, and carried on. Then, sometime later, I came across a similar looking word and shortcut my way to a mistaken definition. These things happen.
The idea encapsulated in the next paragraph didn’t work quite as well as I had hoped. In the beginning, I tried very hard to find words that I didn’t know, especially when I had a source I could point to, as in peripatetic. That quickly became difficult, not because I know all the words (although, ahem, I do) but because we, as English speakers, tend to use the same words over and over. New words often come with context that explains them, so it’s only rarely that someone uses a word that we don’t know. Instead, I had to pivot to thinking about how words we know acquire secondary or tertiary meanings, and that would become the focus of Volume 6 of Learned.
But that, in a nutshell, is the point of this 5th volume of Learned - we come across unknown words all the time. Maybe it’s a new piece of slang that the kids are using, maybe it’s an old word that someone has decided to dust off and re-purpose, maybe it’s just one we haven’t heard before, but, for whatever reason, here’s a word we’re not quite sure of so what do we do? We say it again, but slowly, and we figure it out.
Down the Rabbit Hole
This Reddit thread led me to this video by Adam Neely about Conlon Nancarrow with stops at this insane YouTube channel that makes the most bizarrely incredible piano music I’ve ever seen. Set some time aside and dive deep into impossible music3.
The Rabbit Hole and Archives sections made their return and their debut, respectively with this issue and both worked quite well over the year. I may have to re-introduce them yet again for Volume 8.
From the Archives
It’s funny, although I’d had a Kindle for years at that point, I hadn’t really gotten into exploring all the social features Amazon was slowly baking into the devices and software. But, in the lead-up to Learned Vol. 2, Issue 27: Smooth Seas, (originally published September 30, 2019) I started doing just that, especially by highlighting bits of text and sharing them out on the interwebs4. All of which led into this issue, which is all about word art. Enjoy!
And now, at long last, just below this closing line are the beautiful, beautiful footnotes! Enjoy and see you next week for a look at Volume Six, Issue 1 and Volume Seven, Issue 1. The week after that Learned returns with Volume 8, Issue 1. Thanks for reading and hope to see you there.
And, not to put too fine a point on it, has done so without disenfranchising a minor but disproportionately vulnerable portion of the fan base.
Favourite Uncle is actually a short story in the Rivers of London universe. It stars Abigail, Peter’s cousin, who is a budding young investigator herself, like an urban Nancy Drew for the Harry Potter crowd.
Down the Rabbit Hole is likely to be a weekly feature. Back in Volumes 2 and 3 of Learned, I had similar sections and I kind of miss them, so they’re back! Don’t expect too much from them, they’re just a space for me to drop in a topic completely unrelated to Learned’s main feature.
It’s not lost on me that, although I quote from a book at the beginning of this issue, I didn’t do the Kindle quote feature. There are two reasons for this - one, I wanted to getting back to featuring some of the amazing work that shows up on Unsplash, and two, I hope that not every quote for this volume is going to come from a book and I wanted to keep the look consistent.
Wow, I like the way you are writing these commentaries. It's like behind the scenes of Learned. Lastly, the origin of peripatetic is an interesting read.