For years, I’ve heard the term “vetting,” and though I knew what it meant, I had no idea how the word originated.
Vetting, of course, means checking into a candidate’s history before appointment to a job or political office. It’s most often used in the political world.
The other day, I finally did some research into the word, and here is what I found:
Vetting stems from the word veterinarian. It was originally a word used in horse-racing because horses had to be “vetted” by a veterinarian – checked for health and fitness before being allowed to run in a race.
The word veterinarian has been around since the mid-1600s, as has its shortened version, vet.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the terms “to vet” or “vetting” were first used in 1891 in the context of horse-racing, to mean “to treat an animal.” Since then, it has taken on a broadened meaning for “to check” or “to check out beforehand.” By the early 1900s, the verb to vet began to be used as a synonym for to evaluate something or someone in a search for possible flaws or negative traits.
Other synonyms for to vet are to check, to examine, to scrutinize, to investigate, to inspect and to appraise – especially in the context of ensuring someone is suitable for a job that would require secrecy, loyalty and trustworthiness.
Makes sense to me. Glad I looked it up.
Existential
Another word that has had me stumped for months is existential. These days, we hear it frequently from TV commentators. Try as I might, I cannot figure out what they mean when they use it. Years ago, I spent a lot of time reading existential philosophy and existential literature, mainly as propounded by the French philosopher-novelist-playwright Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980).
Existentialism is a difficult philosophy to grasp as it tends to be subjective, hard to define, varying among its widely differing adherents – philosophers, writers and artists. However, as described by Sartre, existentialism means humans’ “existence precedes essence,” that people have free will and therefore human beings can and must make choices, that they are not helplessly dependent on the influences in their lives. A person with “bad faith,” in Sartre’s world, is a kind of human jellyfish, someone who is afraid of freedom, afraid of choice and thus cowardly or lazily caves into the delusion he has no choice, he’s just a hapless puppet of fortune.
By making courageous choices, people of “good faith” create and structure their lives through acts – not words – but the choices, the acts, can be difficult, painful and even life-threatening, as in wars or in social-justice movements.
Lately, commentators often say statements like these:
“The situation in Syria has become existential.”
“It’s definitely an existential crisis because South Korea has no idea what North Korea is planning to do next.”
Every time I’ve heard that word lately, it made absolutely no sense in the context in which it was used, at least not to me.
Well, hooray, just today to the rescue came language-usage expert Jane Mairs on a website called Merriam-Webster Learner’s Dictionary.
Mairs explained in the news these days, commentators often use the word existential when they mean a people’s existence or survival is in dire jeopardy, as in the bloody cauldron of the Middle East.
OK, I guess that makes sense, sort of, though I’d prefer the commentators would say, more simply, threatened or endangered rather than the vague-and-murky existential.
Mairs also noted there are two other common uses of existential: existential questions and an existential crisis. The first means questions of life and of life’s meaning (in the Sartrian sense). The second is mostly used as a sarcastic jibe against the kinds of people who are too wrapped up in their own lives – perpetual navel-gazers. Oops. That means, probably, we are all a bit guilty from time to time of being too wrapped up in our own existential crises.
Word sleuths
There must be plenty of word sleuths among Newsleader readers. I wish you would share some of the words and meanings you have discovered or “unlocked.” Send them to me with your comments, and I’ll publish them.
