[Having recently returned to teaching English after a long absence, I find that a lot of interesting material relating to language (especially vocabulary) comes up through interaction with students’ questions. Words are complex things with long histories and meanings that tend to shift about over time. It is often worth exploring this history and the resulting field of meanings in more depth as a way of providing broader understanding of a word’s scope and reach than is possible by way of dictionary definitions or online translation tools. This first in a projected series of posts on individual English lexemes concerns the words ‘feed’ and ‘food’ and was inspired by a student asking me why the word ‘feed’ is used in information technology/new media terms such as ‘newsfeed’ and how this is related to the word ‘food’.]

Food for Thought

“Food”, as one might expect, is a word with very ancient roots. It goes back to a Proto-Indo-European *peh₂(s) root and has oscillated interestingly over time between humans and animals, active and passive, and, more recently, has become entwined in the way that we talk about technology, the media and financial markets.

If the Indo-European origin of this word is correct (and we should always view such conjectures with a huge pinch of salt), food started out as a word closer to the modern English ‘feed’. The Latinate cognates derived from Latin pascere for example refer almost exclusively to grazing and, by extension, shepherding (consider English pastoral, pasture and pastor, for example).

This set of words in turn may also be related (at least by conflation) to those surrounding the concepts of passivity and passion (stemming from Latin patior [=suffer, undergo], which is postulated to be derived from a very similar Proto-Indo-European root *peh₁(t).

In Modern English, ‘feed’ can be used both as an intransitive verb (to refer to animals grazing), as a noun (to refer to food for animals and distinguish it from food fit for human consumption), or as a transitive verb, on occasions when food is being given by an adult human being providing sustenance for another creature incapacitated by infancy, senility, invalidity or captivity.

The word has also branched out (as successful words tend to) into more figurative realms. Fire, for example, can be fed (a more evocative expression than ‘fuel’), as can passions, emotions and enthusiasm.

In the early days of information science, machines were fed with information, thus enabling them to provide ‘feedback’—a word that has taken on a whole prosperous life of its own. More banally, we feed paper into a printer or a fax machine, as if it were a small animal, eager for our attention.

And nowadays we are fed news and information through online feeds, as if we now were the small helpless animals or infants at the mercy of news outlets, propagandists and tweeting trolls.

All of this fervid exchange of information and misinformation creates a kind of ‘feeding frenzy’ on both sides. “Feeding frenzy” is an ecological term that refers to the tendency of animals that have no control over satiety to overfeed, sometimes to the point of literally bursting, when presented with a sudden glut of food.

The feeders of information create a feeding frenzy among their readers and feed frenziedly in turn on the feedback they receive in return. I feel we are all already a little bloated, if not fit to burst, and fed up with this right now.

The way out of this ultimately self-destructive feeding frenzy might be to focus more on ‘food’.

The shift from a sharp close frontal vowel to one that is more open and articulated further back in the mouth generally indicates a slowing of pace, increasing moderation and reflection. “Bing, bang, bong!” “Clip, clap, clop” etc. This is reflected in the ‘principal parts’ of the ‘irregular’ English verbs that involve vowel changes: “sing”, ”sang”,” sung” etc.

“Food” is calmer than “feed”. It is more focused on quality and digestion, long-term effects, culinary preparation and ancient traditions. It is no accident that evangelical Christians feed us with images and ideas of scripture as ‘food.’ The idea of divine law or wisdom providing more lasting sustenance than mere ‘feed’ is a very ancient one. Food for thought indeed.