What is, and what is not, invention?
If you discern a mathematical relationship that no one has noticed before, and you produce an equation characterizing it, you didn’t invent it, did you? You just applied existing methods to a new discovery.
If you come up with a wordplay, you don’t invent a pun – it is not so much an act of creation as just one of noticing, right?
What about if you write poetry? That may be a matter of thinking something out, but is it sensible to speak of inventing a poem?
Paul Quarrington thought so; in his play The Invention of Poetry, it is not the idea or paradigm or practice of poetry that is spoken of as being invented, but rather the wordstuff of a particular poem. That’s how Shakespeare and Dryden used invent, synonymously with create. But it seems unidiomatic now.
So what, then, do we mean when we say invent? If I invent a vent, what developments and differentiations must I devise so that it’s not merely an advance or variation? I don’t need to invent the concept or practice of venting; I need only invent a new way to vent – something clever, something that shows a spark of inspiration, the divine afflatus or at least an insight of the moment. Perhaps something that lets me vent steam from my stove without installing a duct or merely recirculating. (Don’t ask me what. I didn’t say I had invented it.)
But say I do invent a vent, or some other advent of invention eventuates. Is it the exertion of my own genius, or is it just something that somehow comes to me, or that I somehow come upon?
Different people have different opinions, to be sure. In particular, the ancient Anglo-Saxons saw it one way, and the Romans another. The Anglo-Saxon word for ‘invent’ was āþenċan, literally ‘think out’ – make a thought and excrete it into the world. But that was supplanted by a word taken from French inventer, which in its turn came from Latin inventus, past participle of invenio, which is from in ‘in’ and venio ‘I come’ (different from the source of vent, ventus, which is from a root meaning ‘blow’ and is cognate with wind).
This means not so much that the invention comes into you – blown into your head, as it were – as that you come into, or upon, the invention. If in Latin I want to speak of someone or something being found or discovered, I can use inventus. This seems odd to the English eye, as though a detective might invent a corpse (obviously more the work of the murderer, at least in Dryden’s sense of invent, which can include simple making from raw materials). But there it is.
We came into the word invent, anyway, and at first we used it like discover – which means ‘remove the cover from’, remember – or discern – which comes from roots meaning ‘separate, divide, sieve’. Then we came to use it like devise, which is historically a doublet of divide; our current sense descends from a use with wills, where the dividing of possessions was converted into instructions, and then from giving instructions the sense moved on to figuring out.
Today, we conceive of the mental act invent as synonymous with create, from Latin creo, related to a root meaning ‘grow’, and with conceive, which comes from con ‘with’ plus capio ‘I seize, I grasp’. You may sow or you may reap and yet you invent.
But in the material production, we use invent as a sort of synonym for contrive… with which we find that what went around has come around. It’s from con ‘with’ and Old French trovar ‘find’, from Latin tropare, which meant ‘find’, and before that ‘invent’, and before that specifically ‘create poetry’, from tropus ‘figurative use of a word’ (you may recognize the source of English trope in it). It’s almost poetic justice. Or at least the intrinsic inadvertent inventiveness of verbal evolution.
