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[ 4 minute read ] 

Inevitably, you are wrong

I once won a bet in a pub that the word 'expostulate' is a word. Of course, we can make up words but 'expostulate' is in the dictionary as well as 'postulate'.

It was lunch-time and I had dropped into my village local for a pint. Every now and then, someone who had moved into the village might pop in but, but seemingly only once or twice a year. The local village pub rarely suited the strange people who moved into our village. One day, a chap I recognised came in. He didn't buy anything from the bar. He just came over to me, the only person in the pub and started chatting to me. Somehow or other, I must have used the word 'expostulate' and he was shocked. He was convinced I had made it up since he knew the word 'postulate' to mean something like, 'to claim' or 'to demand'. 

       'How can expostulate exist? You made it up!'

       'I bet you £5,' I challenged. He took the bet and since he lived just across the road told me he would go home and check his dictionary.

       'Expostulate is a word!'

       'I know. You owe me £5.' He looked crestfallen as though he expected that I would waive the penalty for not believing me. Reluctantly, he paid and our sunny conversation was over. I never saw him in the pub again.

I seem to think that 'postulate' and 'expostulate' mean precisely the same thing. Funnily though, I have never used either in a conversation since that quiet Summer. Of course, those people who recognise Latinate words would realise that the prefix 'ex' means something like, 'outward' (exit) or is more commonly used as denoting that something has come to pass such as 'ex-partner' or 'excommunicate'.

This, however, is not a lecture on the meaning of words or their roots, much as I am intrigued by words. This is a note that it does not pay to be too confident about what we know, and more importantly what we allow ourselves to believe simply because our brains fill in the gaps of our ignorance just so we can concentrate on actually living and progressing. Put another way, our minds make up stuff. Like some haughty armchair critic they postulate solutions to conundrums we haven't even realised exist. If I had the time, I would watch my brain and record everything it says, clipboard and time-piece in hand.

       'Just say that again, would you. I had a problem spelling some of those words. No? Did you make them up?'

This, of course, is covered by the adage that 'a little knowledge is worse than none at all'.

A long time ago, I got three books out of the library. I was suddenly interested in The Theory of Relativity and I needed to understand time a little better. It might have been Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity; who cares! In any case, a third year undergraduate remarked, during a conversation I was having with him, that I was talking as a third year Physics student might. Everything was fine if we never left the subject of time.

He may well have filled in some gaps and considered that I know physics. He is wrong; I was interested in why an observer would see the tail-lights of a passing rocket come on before the headlights, if it was travelling close to the speed of light and the pilot switched the lights on as they passed the observer. The question arose from another question I came across, which I suppose was just someone aimlessly pondering (probably stoned) in a magazine article (possibly 'New Scientist'); 'Since nothing can go faster than the speed of light, would the pilots of a rocket traveling at the speed of light, be able to see their way forward with their headlights? The question was asking if the (light) photons from the headlights would travel at twice the speed of light, or would the rocket catch up with them? An example of a thought-experiment, I think.

Off I went to the library to find out for myself. I still don't know and the 'question' of time-travel somehow got attached to my workings. I later asked a rocket scientist in The Netherlands about time-travel and he said if he could just eliminate mass he could make a time-machine. Later, I discovered that if anyone got into it and pressed 'Go' they would find themselves floating in space because Earth would, in a different time, be somewhere else, either in its orbit or in the solar system.

       'Roll up! Roll up! Try the time-machine and go to the time of your dreams. See the dinosaurs, the Battle of Hastings, or relive your first kiss. Come on, only two Shillings. Many people never want to come back! Meet the Neanderthals! Roll up! Roll up!'

I think I will stick to the Cake Walk.

How many of us would try a time-machine without checking that it would also move us laterally in space as well as temporally? Absent knowledge would NOT be filled by our brains filling in the gaps with invented stuff. All our brains would do is suggest that we might not be able to get back again, such as, 'If we go back in time will the time-machine disappear because it hasn't been invented yet? Neither have you! 

I had a similar, extremely short, conversation on a Creative Writing learning platform over the winter. I realised that it had taken me years to come up with just the one idea that if we don't move laterally through space at close to the speed of light to get to the place where Earth was or will be, we would be stuck in the time machine forever. To the world we would have vanished and to the time-traveller the world would have vanished. Eventually, we would need to use a toilet though.

No thanks. Time-travel sounds like agony.

       'Roll up! Roll up!.....'

       'Stop right there, you Victorian charlatan! You have to give us at least ten years to be able to find the right people to talk this through with.'

       'Go forward ten years and be in possession of the knowledge you need to make the right decisions. Roll up! Roll up!'

In my mind, the fairground hawker is expostulating a solution to an unfulfilled desire, and the responder is postulating a condition. My mind says that the 'ex' means that something is forceful, as in 'expel', 'excommunicate', 'expend' and 'expatriate'. Modern English language doesn't follow this idea though.

Here's a weird word I stumbled across while looking in my dictionary - 'eudemonic' meaning 'conducive to happiness' (Concise Oxford Dictionary, Oxford University Press, 1982). A bit of Greek there.....

I once said to a French woman in a supermarket, 'We English speak French, German, Latin and Greek, except we don't pronounce the words very well.'