It’s no secret that wealth comes with cachet, but the catch is that you need some place to cache your cash, eh.
There’s one word in that sentence, by the way, that seems to trip up a lot of people. Did you catch it? It’s not cachet – everyone seems to know that you say that like “cash, eh.” It’s cache. Which I’ve heard a few ways – even with a long a (but still with the ch as “sh,” not “k” – which would take the cake!). Many people seem to think that it’s said like caché. But in fact that last e is… well, not caché, i.e., hidden, but silent. You should say cache just like you say cash. It’s true that cache means ‘hide’ and that a cache is a place where things are hidden and ‘hidden’ is caché, but the noun is not formed from the past participle.
Anyway. You know that a cache is a place you hide things, right? On your computer, the cache is just temporary storage, and not really hidden, but everywhere else, it’s temporary storage of a particular kind: not meant to be found. It’s where you stash your cash – or other treasure – when you have to dash. As I said, cacher means ‘hide’; it comes from a Latin word, coactus, meaning ‘compelled’ or ‘assembled’. It is not related to cash, but that’s almost surprising; cash comes from French caisse ‘money box’, from Latin capsa ‘box’, from capio ‘I take’. Cash is closely related to case and chase and catch and not much more distantly to capture. So when you chase someone and catch them and capture their case full of cash, those are all related words, but when you cache the cash in a cache, that’s just a coincidence of sound.
On the other hand, cachet is quite closely related to cache. That may seem odd, since cachet means ‘prestige’ and as such is by definition not hidden. You can’t cache cachet! The trick, though, is that cachet referred first to the royal seal on a letter – often a letter condemning someone to prison or exile (meaning they will be hidden, but that’s not the connection). The seal was called a cachet, Littré explains, “parce que le cachet cache” – it hides. But this seal, being from the king, carried significance – a letter with a cachet could have prestige (if it wasn’t tossing you out of the country or into the dungeon, of course). And in the broader sense, a cachet was a distinguishing mark. From that, we came to use it for a distinguishing mark of prestige.
But when we think of things that have cachet, it does still seem that while the signifiers are eye-catching, they’re not clashing or crashing; quiet wealth, indicated through subtle details, is more esteemed than vulgar excess. The seals of approval can open meaning to those who know, but such knowledge itself signifies status. To have cachet, we discover, you do need more than just cash, eh.
If you, as an architect, aspired to inspire, what might you do? Would you conspire to spear the air? A tower of any shape has the dominating height that looms like an adult over a small child, but mere parapets, however parental, do not quite get to the point like a spire does.
In part it’s a matter of perspective: a spire can seem to disappear into the celestial sphere rather than coming to a blunt end. From any angle, it has more to spare. And it can come in many forms – pyramidal, conical, octagonal, even spiral – but it is always poised like a stylus or quill to write in the welkin.
Well, then, what does it write? What words does this needle tattoo in the heavens, or in your mind? It is simple enough to see it in words like conspire, inspire, and so on, and to hear its similarity to spear and perhaps spare and, of course, spiral. We might well expect it’s related to some of them; at the very least, the resemblance can be a reminder, which can add incidental flavours and expectations – the sort of thing that justifies the luxury of having overlapping senses of spiral and helix, for instance: they still sound and seem different because echoes and overtones conspire to inspire, or lift like helium.
But what, really, are resemblances, and how far can they go? What things are the same thing as other things, and what merely look alike? We know it only goes to a point. What, for instance, is the essence of a spire? Let me put it this way: Do you know what the highest spire in the world is? You may think of cathedrals in Salisbury and Cologne and so on, because a spire, of course, is a thing on a church. But all the highest spires are buildings of commerce and capital and occasionally communication, rising from the street without sanctuary or nave or transept. The highest spire in the world is the Burj Khalifa. And I live near another that used to be the highest, the CN Tower. Do you get the point? A spire needs not aspire to divinity to inspire. It needs only be a… what, a spear into the sky?
Perhaps, but etymologically, no: the word is not from, or a cousin of, spear, though there may have been some cross-influence through similarity – especially since the Old English source of spire, spir, was pronounced like modern spear, which in its turn came from Old English spere, which sounded more like how we would say “spare a.” Nor, by the way, is spire related to any of the breath-related spire words such as respire and inspire. Instead, spire is a word originally for the stalk or stem of a plant. A blade of grass, perhaps, or the peak of a tree. Something growing from the earth and reaching sharply for the sky – but just to a point.
“The Art Gallery of Ontario has a marvellous spiral staircase,” I said to Jess and Arlene as we stood talking at Domus Logogustationis.
“Helical, surely,” a voice from behind me said.
My respiration caught sharply, briefly, and then I exhaled and turned. I found myself facing a fellow I hadn’t met before – evidently a guest of some other member of the Order of Logogustation.
He continued. “A helix has a constant radius, whereas a spiral has a constantly increasing radius. The staircases that are commonly but erroneously called ‘spiral’ are wrapped in a constant radius around an axis.”
I reflected briefly that he had probably never tried calling an architect “erroneous” to their face. I certainly wouldn’t – and especially not Frank Gehry, who designed the staircase I was talking about. “Have you been to the Art Gallery of Ontario?”
“That’s rather beside the point, I’d think,” he said.
“Beside the axis, perhaps. Or the axis is beside itself. The staircase in question is in fact irregular. It is called a ‘spiral staircase’ because that is the term used for the general type, but it is not a perfectly helix or spiral, though I would add that its radius does decrease toward the top.” I pulled out my phone as I was talking and found him a couple of photos I had taken of the staircase in question.
“Grotesque,” he said.
“I suppose it’s not to everyone’s taste,” I replied.
“Literally grotesque,” he said. “As in distorted like a grotto. Grottesco. But not helical and not spiral. It is important to get these things right. I was under the impression that you people here cared about the English language.”
“Oh, we certainly do,” I said, “the way naturalists care about a forest, not the way a florist cares about cut roses. English has been here long before us, it will be here long after us, and it grows through us. It is ever growing.” I moved my finger in an increasing spiral.
“Turning in the widening gyre,” our guest said. “Things fall apart and the centre cannot hold. When a word is given a precise meaning, it is an act of desecration to broaden its use wantonly. It will spiral out of control.”
Jess interjected. “If a child is a certain height when born, does that mean we should cut off its legs when it grows, so that it will never become larger?”
Arlene, who had been busily looking some things up on her phone, joined right after her. “And then there’s the question of what it was when it was born. Neither of these words – spiral and helix – was so strict in its definition when it came into the language, and their definitions for most use cases contain each other.” She had the Oxford English Dictionary definitions in hand, plus some etymology. “Spiral: ‘Forming a succession of curves arranged like the thread of a screw; coiled in a cylindrical or conical manner; helical.’ It’s from Greek σπεῖρα ‘something twisted or wound.’ Helix: ‘Anything of a spiral or coiled form’; helical: ‘Belonging to or having the form of a helix; screw-shaped; spiral.’ It’s from Greek ἕλιξ ‘something twisted or spiral.’”
The guest waved his hand. “Yes, yes, that is why I said ‘when a word is given a precise meaning.’ They may have been sloppy to begin with, but a distinction has been made, just as one has been made between persuade and convince, just as one has been made between less and fewer.” I stifled a snort; my opinion on the subject is no secret. He continued, “Precision in all things. I think you have all heard of the etymological fallacy. We can’t say these words should be sloppy just because in origin they were.”
I nearly coughed at his mention of the etymological fallacy. Was he trying to whack me with my own frying pan? If a word isn’t fixed at its origin – and it is not – how could it be fixed at some other point in time? “And who is it that gives these restricted meanings?” I said.
“Once a definition has been established and accepted in a field or expertise most directly relevant to it, it has gained scholastic authority; it is institutionalized,” he said. “This can proceed variously, but the result is the same: its acceptance grows and grows” – his finger traced a downward helix in the air – “until it is quite embedded. Screwed in, as it were.”
“Within that field, yes,” Jess said, “but specific fields have specific exigencies that more general usage does not. Consider the botanical definition of berry, which includes bananas and excludes strawberries. The term has been pressed into a special use in a way that is viable in a biology lab but not in a kitchen.”
“Kitchens are home to much messy thinking,” the guest said. “If cooks were more mathematical they would produce cleaner, more consistent results.”
More consistently boring, I thought. But I said, “Engineering is mathematical. Architecture is mathematical. And yet engineers and architects still call such staircases ‘spiral stairs.’”
“As they have since the 1600s,” Arlene added.
“They have yet to catch up, perhaps,” our guest said, “but the best use of a word is the most precise.” He traced in the air a narrowing conical spiral. “Meaning increases in acuity over time, as long as we shape it. We just need to get to the point.” He jabbed his finger to make the point.
“I gather,” Jess said, “that you have no use for metaphor or poetry?”
“Stopgaps for the primitive imagination,” he said.
Jess snickered. “Stopgaps. No metaphor there.”
“Well,” I said, returning to the initial subject, “Frank Gehry shaped the staircase in the AGO, and I think it’s a great metaphor for language development: irregular, fascinating, with various twists and turns, and at the top, the point of it all, is… art.”
The guest chortled. “There’s a reason I haven’t seen the staircase in question. Art is simply reality badly rendered.”
I inhaled and was about to form a comment on his artlessness, but I sensed that this was spiraling out of control, or at least descending in a helix to hell. I paused, circling in my mind.
But Arlene got straight to the point. Fixing him with a steady gaze, she spiraled her finger towards the door: “Screw off, you.”
Sesquiotica 