November 20, 2005
Secretary
"Secretary" implies two seemingly opposite sorts of jobs: the low-end one, who sits at a desk and organizes her boss's work; and the high-end one, who is the big boss himself (the Secretary of Defense). How did this one word come to mean he who gives the orders and he who takes it?
Dictionary.com helps with the answer by summarizing the etymology of the word:
[Middle English secretarie, from Medieval Latin secretarius, confidential officer, clerk, from Latin secertus, secret. See secret.]
Secretary--in other words--comes from secret (put that into the class of things so obvious that I never realized it). The secretary, high or low, is the person in whom the other members of the team have complete confidence. And you need to have complete confidence in both the people high up and those down low.
This implies another interesting etymology as well: confidence. Note how I played a bit of a word game in the above paragraph, using two definitions of confidence: the confidential officers is one who keeps a secret (keeping a secret is one type of confidence) but then there's having confidence in members of your team (trusting them to get something done, which is a different type of confidence). What's the similarity? Well, let's look up its etymology: Confidence is from confide, which - thinking about the word in adjective form - is pretty obvious, "with faith" (fide=faith, think of "fidelity"). What all of these different definitions have in common then, is that a secretary or confidant is someone you believe in.
Therefore, those who don't believe in belief or faith, probably have difficulty trusting or believing in people, too. The agnostics, in other words, will probably be socialist.
Posted by Morgan at 01:42 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
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Comments
Hmm. Of the many criticisms of socialism I’ve heard, lack of bureaucracy is a new one.
The interesting thing to me is the subtle way in which we’ve come to perceive the term ‘secretary’ as synonymous with ‘the one who gives the orders’. Originally, there would not have been irony in considering the presidential cabinet as well and truly an administrative ancillary. To the extent that we tend to see following procedure as more important than active consideration, it’s a natural step to allow the clerks to be in charge of controlling information. I would be hard pressed to recall the last US president not to have eventually been victimized by the authority of his own staff in that regard.
Posted by: ooghe at November 21, 2005 03:15 PM
Confidante. Confidence Man. Con-man.
Posted by: Alex Jacobson at November 23, 2005 11:23 PM
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