_{Photo by Soheb Zaidi on Unsplash}

Here is a little riddle.

What do the words ‘prose,’ ‘verse,’ ‘conversation,’ and ‘weird’ ‘worms’ ‘wriggling’ ‘towards’ you have in common with ‘worth’, ‘worry’, ‘wrongdoing’ and every word that begins with the prefix ‘re-’: ‘return’, ‘reverse’, ‘revolution’, ‘revision’, ‘remembrance’ and all the rest?

The answer is the Proto-Indo-European root *wer(t)- meaning ‘turn’ or ‘bend,’ which turns up as prefix re- and suffix –vert in Latin, and as a wer- wor- or wr- prefix in Germanic languages such as English.

Tempted we may be to deceive ourselves into thinking that the words ‘word,’ ‘world’ and ‘awareness’ also derive from the same root, but alas they do not.

In fact, at least seven other distinct Indo-European roots are all churned into wer- or something similar to it in more modern languages.

There is, first, the wer- of ‘air’ and ‘aura’, of ‘arias’ and ‘aerobics’, ‘arteries’ and ‘meteors’.

And then there is wer- of watching out and warding off, found in ‘aware’, ‘beware’, ‘warden’, ‘warehouse’, ‘wary’, ‘hardware’, ‘software’, ‘reverence’ and ‘veneration’.

A third is the wer- of covering found in ‘warrants’, ‘guarantees’, ‘garnishes’ and ‘garages’.

And there is a fourth wer- meaning human being, as in ‘werewolf’ and ‘virility.’

This fourt ‘werewolf ‘ prefix, in combination with IE *gher(d) (which gives us ‘gardens’ and ‘yards’) has also provided us with the word for the very world (*weregherd) upon which, should we need reminding, we are doomed always to live.

And, were this not enough, there is a fifth wer- of ‘word’ and ‘verb’, and a sixth found in ‘veracity’ and ‘verisimilitude’.

And, most disturbing of all, there is the seventh wer- of ‘war’ and ‘worse’.

‘Dike eris, eris dike’, as the old philosopher put it. Law is war and war is law.

Language is a wayward tangled mess indeed, with sounds and meanings forever converging and diverging as they hurtle through eternity together on the lips of hasty-tongued human beings. What rhapsodies we are apt to wrest from the vortex of adversity into which we are thus thrust by peevish fate.

The /w/ sound is also one of the most prevalent in world languages and one of the first to be mastered by infants. This phoneme is more primordial—more inchoate and pre-maternal—than /m/, reminding us of the womb to which we are wont to revert.

The idea of twisting and bending things is likewise primal and it should come as no surprise that it ends up lending its name to our entire universe, wrought as it is of quantum entanglement in our prose and verse, and the war of all against all.