When words stay and meanings morph

Listening to my colleague Aparna Chaudhuri speak in the Close Reading Room series organised at the university where I teach, I was surprised by the etymological history of the word ‘extravagant’. The ‘extra’, Aparna reminded her audience, meant ‘outside’ – as a reader of what is professionally categorised as early British literature, that etymological knowledge had given her an insight into reading these literary texts that she said she might not have had otherwise. I can’t exactly remember what she said right after because my mind had paused to register what to it was a new understanding of ‘out’, particularly ‘outside’.

Returning home, I decided to look it up myself. In the late 14th century, ‘extravagaunt’ was one half of a phrase – ‘constituciouns extravagaunt’ – which meant a term in ‘Canon Law for papal decrees not originally included or codified in the Decretals’; it had come from Medieval Latin – ‘extravagari “wander outside or beyond”, from Latin extra “outside of” + vagary “wander, roam”’. By the 15th century ‘it could also mean “rambling, irrelevant; extraordinary, unusual”’, and, by extension, a ‘sense of “excessive, extreme, exceeding reasonable limits”, so that by 1771, it had come to stand for ‘wasteful, lavish, exceeding prudence in expenditure’.

Given my predilection, I had fixated on the word ‘out’, how it had found a home in ‘extra’, and how a word that had emerged from ‘roaming, wandering outside’ had come to mean what it does to us today – ‘wasteful, lavish’ and ‘more expensive than is reasonable’. This seemingly naturalised passage – and, indeed, lineage – from the outside to something wasteful and expensive bothers me, bothers me in a way the thin eyebrow-fashion of the 1980s does, without consequence. I’m led to wonder about how ‘eat out’, a phrase that begins to enter the colloquial from the 1930s, would feed or derive from the hidden ‘out’ in ‘extravagant’.

Much before health experts would begin using condemnatory language for eating at restaurants, a thrifty temperament would have created this connection between eating outside the house and extravagance. There would have been the impress of another history, more subtle, more muscular – that the world was being miniaturised and brought inside the house: the temple as puja ghar, the nautanki, jatra, bioscope, and cinema as television set, and so on. The outside was not only being made redundant, it was also being ascribed as impure. It wasn’t just the reiteration and refurbishing of the ‘angel in the house’, it was a shrinking of the world that was worth human interest and capital.

The seeming – and opportunistic – rejection of the outside, with its shifting perimeter, meant that it would soon be exoticised into something inaccessible and therefore desirable. Tourism, far-from-the-madding-crowd, a consumption and production of the outside, the ‘outdoors’, would first infiltrate into the cramped interior, of living spaces and offices, the mind and the roadsides, so that one would be compelled to seek, in Rabindranath’s words, ‘space, more space’. That a monosyllabic sound – ‘space’ – could hold in it everything outside built space feels like a desperate sigh, even a longing as a species for what was once unconditional but is now lost.

It must be this mammalian recovery of our relationship to the outside that makes us buy tickets, book hotels, put our feet inside ships and sky, and become extra-vagant. For about a century now, but more acutely in this millennium, we’ve seen this desire afflict literature. The history of early twenty-first century literature will probably be a history of grief and a history of retreat. ‘Retreat’ enters the language around the 13th century – its life begins by meaning withdrawal, a kind of step backward; in the space of two centuries, it comes to mean ‘territory, region of indefinite extent, stretch of land or water’. Notice the word’s emerging relationship with the outdoors, so that by the time the 17th century metaphysical poet Henry Vaughan comes to use it in a religious poem, choosing it also its title, it is able to hold in it not just the desire to return to ‘angel infancy’ but a space that is actually outdoors: a ‘shady city of palm trees’.

That word today is used for writer and artist residencies, not to mean a return to the ‘ancient track’ of Vaughan’s poem but to mean a space where one can step into a kind of ‘outdoor’ time or time out of time. The desire is, of course, legitimate, as all such urges are, but I fear that the literature that finds no space or indulgence in such retreats is by the kind of writer who has to actually work outdoors for a living – the working-class writer.