[Here is my take on today’s Finding Everyday Inspiration https://dailypost.wordpress.com/blogging-university/writing-everyday-inspiration/ prompt on the subject of “Hope” ]

Hope and Speed

Latinate and Germanic languages and Ancient Greek diverge drastically when it comes to hope.

The Latin word for hope “spes” has a root meaning that very sensibly and practically refers to prosperity and, by extension, in Roman legal texts, to the process of recovering debts.

This contrasts with the Greek idea of hope as one of the cardinal sins; up there with hubris. This is exemplified in the canonical story of Orpheus and Eurydice (in which Orpheus is punished for looking back in hope) and the same theme is pounded out again and again in the dour choruses of Greek tragedies written under the shadow of the Peloponnesian Cold War.

No surprise, then, that Christianity went for Latin rather than Greek in developing its own very upbeat concept of hope.

This chirpier Latin root has not found its way into English words for hope, except by the circuitous route of French, and then only in its opposite “despair”. Instead, Germanic languages drew on an Indo-European root related to ‘hop’ to express this abstract idea.

Different from the Latin and Greek concepts (which are very abstract), the hope/hop field of meanings summons up a clearly visual idea of someone hopping up and down, leaning forward and looking out for better things to come, naïve as a small child or ‘hopped up’ on psychotropic drugs.

England’s history of industrial revolution, abolition of slavery and the establishment of fair play in the rule of law suggest that this way of conceiving of hope in terms of an adolescent girl hopping up and down in excited expectation may have its rewards.

The more practical Indo-European root of Latin ‘spes’ has, nevertheless, not been overlooked in the English language. It pops up in “speed,” in so far as this word refers to time-efficiency in achieving a desired goal. The same word is also employed, like ‘hop’, to refer to a drug that creates an illusion of this forward propulsion.

The various meanings bind together with a certain felicity in a term current in North America, but archaic in the United Kingdom: “God speed!”