In the beginning, everything was inchoate.
Of course it was. Incoherent and chaotic, right? Barely formed and still messy? And then later, as the cohort achieved concatenation, it became choate?
Rather not. Strap in. We’re heading into the woods.
We look at this word, inchoate, and we see the in- of incoherent and incomprehensible and incomplete. But that’s where the trouble starts, for this is really the in- of incipient, intend, and inject (and, yes, inflammable). And the word’s history is rather uncouth.
For starts, what’s with this choate that spells “co-8”? Is it chaotically inspired? Yes, literally, it would seem – the resemblance to chaos is probably what caused the h to slide over. You see, the Latin source of inchoate is incohatus. It’s the past participle of incoho, ‘I begin’ – which comes from cohum, which names a strap that is used to attach a pole to a yoke, plus in- as in “strap in!”
So it means, literally, ‘strapped in’ (or ‘yoked up’) – and, figuratively, ‘begun’. That seems kind of ho-hum: it makes “In the beginning, everything was inchoate” vacuously true. Which, in fact, it is – but the word inchoate has also added some developments to its sense, not just from the general implications of ‘just begun’ as ‘immature’, ‘rudimentary’, ‘not yet assembled with Allen keys’, et cetera, but also from chaotic and perhaps incoherent rubbing off on it (inference by resemblance, a common factor that helps keep language messy). I should say, though, that the spelling inchoate has been with us since the 1500s, but the sense of ‘chaotic, incoherent’ is only documented in the Oxford English Dictionary starting in the early 1900s.
So while the implication is that chaos and incoherency are inherent to incipience, the irony is that this word has become more chaotic and incoherent in spelling and in sense as it has aged.
But what, then, is choate? You could try backforming it – against the cave breeze of etymology – to mean the opposite of inchoate, but you might run into the difficulty of people not knowing what the heck you have in mind. Choate, you see, is already something.
Several somethings, I should say, but most famously a highly esteemed American boarding school, with many illustrious alumni, ranging from John F. Kennedy to Paul Giamatti. The school was named after its founder; the Choate family have been in America since the earliest days of English settlement, and their influence is very well developed indeed now. In recent years, the school has merged with its girls’ counterpart to become the coed Choate Rosemary Hall.
But where did the Choate family begin? It’s not absolutely certain, but it seems to have been in the Chute Forest area in Wiltshire, in southern England (about 8 km north of Andover, which coincidentally is also the name of a prestigious American coed prep school). This Chute is not the kind things slide down; rather, it’s a development of a Brittonic root that is likely also the source of Choate (which, as I probably don’t need to specify, rhymes with stoat). And that root has also descended to the modern Welsh word that means the same thing: coed, ‘woodland’.
Well. Now we truly are into the woods, seeing both trees and forest – and it’s even less coherent than when we began. But that’s the fun of lexical roots and their ramifications.
Sesquiotica 