Sesquiotica

Would you fain be a vane, swivelling with the wind, empty of intrinsic direction, with no sound sense? Nothing more than a conduit, like a vein for the weather? Such a vain existence it would be!

Vain? Do I mean self-centred? How could that be, for one without any independent identity? Do I mean that the efforts would be in vain? But what efforts?

No, I mean something in another vein. I mean the original sense of vain: ‘empty, devoid’, from Latin vanus (or vana or vanum), as in the verse from “O Fortuna,” which is set in the opening of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana:

status malus
vana salus
semper dissolubilis

you are evil
devoid of safety
forever dissoluble

(The latter two lines could be translated more laconically as “not sound.”)

You may know this sense better in the famous line from Ecclesiastes, rendered in the King James Version as “Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.” The Latin – also well known – is “Vanitas vanitatum, dixit Ecclesiastes; vanitas vanitatum, et omnia vanitas.”

But is vanity really the right translation? They just used the English word that was descended from the Latin word, but the English word has shifted in sense, now usually focused specifically on material things and self-centred interests – the sort of thing decried by the preacher of Ecclesiastes, and by many a preacher since, as without intrinsic merit or durable virtue (though many modern preachers seem not to see worldly riches as empty, except inasmuch as they want to empty others’ accounts into their own). In the Latin of its time, vanitas was ‘emptiness, nothingness, falsehood, deception’. So “vanitas vanitatum” could be “emptiness of emptinesses” or “void of voids” or “fake of fakes.” Or, more idiomatically, in the words of the more modern New International Version, “‘Meaningless! Meaningless!’ says the Teacher. ‘Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.’” (The Living Bible, which calls itself a paraphrase, makes this “In my opinion, nothing is worthwhile; everything is futile.”)

But let me make a small digression, if I am able (I can if I may). The original verse from Ecclesiastes was not in Latin; it’s part of what Christians call the Old Testament, otherwise known as the Hebrew Bible. And the Hebrew word that vanitas translates is havel (הבל). 

Not as in Vaclav Havel, Czech president and author of such works as The Garden Party, a play in which a young man finds himself a position in the government Liquidation Office by speaking in empty clichés and at length loses his identity. No, that Havel comes from Latin Gallus, meaning ‘rooster’ – you know, like what you see raised on a weather vane. But the Hebrew havel means ‘vapour, breath’ or ‘air that remains after you exhale’ or, by extension, ‘nothing’. 

As it happens, Havel (הבל) is also the name that has come into English as Abel – you know, the second son of Adam and Eve, liquidated by his brother Cain in a fit of envy because God liked Abel’s sacrifice better: Cain grew vegetables, while Abel raised livestock. Cain’s victory was hollow – but on the other hand he had progeny and Abel was unable, having lost himself. (The relation of Abel’s name to the word meaning ‘nothing’ is subject to scholarly disagreements. According to different accounts, there may be something to it, or it may just be a coincidence of sound, signifying nothing.)

But any effort to connect all of that to which way the wind blows is in vain, not in vane. The weather vane, though it is devoid of its own direction, conveying only the sense of the air that passes by it, is not related to vain. Nor is it related to vein, which comes from Latin vena, meaning ‘blood vessel’ (which could also be an artery; the direction of flow was not specified in Latin as it is in English) and any of many things that similarly carried a flow, such as a watercourse or a vein of ore in a mine. No, though we would fain find sound meaning in coincidences of sound, these too signify nothing. Instead, vane comes from something that has itself changed direction over history: Old English fana.

This word has changed in two ways. The first change is sense: fana meant ‘cloth, banner, flag’; modern cognates such as German Fahne mean ‘flag’. But today, a vane is not flappy fabric at all; it is rigid metal, and its rigidity allows it to show more surely which way the wind is blowing. But speaking of which way the wind is blowing, consider the breath that has gained voice between Old English and now: the f in fana. 

Yes, the second change is sound. In the English of southern England, f in some contexts got a [v] sound, which we see, for example, in vixen, changed from f as in fox (you will notice the vowel also changed, for other reasons). This is also what happened between fana and vane. (It did not happen to fain, but that word – meaning ‘gladly’ or ‘glad’ – is unrelated; it came from Old English fægen.) 

Another thing that happened is that long a, which used to be like in father, shifted, along with the other long vowels of English, and now blows differently: there is no [a] at all in it now, only [eɪ]. And the other a in this word, which was short, lost its identity: it was phonetically emptied and is now not sound, and it is written with e, the usual letter for a vowel that is no longer there, serving only to show you which way the previous vowel blows.

Well, even if the other sounds have changed – not only in vane but also in vain (vana) and vein (vena), since Latin v was [w] or [u] – at least the n remains. Which is either suitable or ironic or both, as n is a well-known variable.