Origins
This chapter provides a long introduction to the history of etymological thought and its intersections with poetic thought, from etiological biblical etymology and its medieval Christian and Jewish interpretations, to the ‘philosophical etymology’ of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century as pursued by Horne Tooke, and later Ralph Waldo Emerson and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, to nineteenth century philology in Britain and Germany. In this chapter ‘the life of words’ implies that language is a sort of living thing, but also the converse, that life is somehow like language. In the pre-modern context these metaphors are imbricated in stories concerning the creation of the cosmos and humanity, and the Fall from Eden, and all that comes after. In the latter context they entail metaphors of linguistic ‘evolution’ and the genealogical relations among words.