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The very ancient prefix ‘inter’ is found everywhere these days.

It stretches back to Proto-Indo-European *antar and its form remained relatively unchanged in the Sanskrit of Ancient India, in which language, it is used to refer to the internal world of the soul.

By the time of the Ancient Greeks, it had shifted to the guts; whence enteritis and gastroenterology.

And by the time it reached Ancient Rome, it had been bleached to a mere prefix meaning vaguely ‘among’ or ‘between’ or very little indeed.

Compared with these two humble Anglo-Saxon words, however, ‘inter-’ is a prefix whose stock is definitely on the rise.

We prize intelligence (human or artificial)—literally the ability to pick out the right things from a mass of others.  

We value interaction, interpersonal skills, intercultural exchanges and international relations, and we find out about all these things on the Internet.

Medical treatments, works of contemporary art, urban planning projects, and family discussions with troubled members are now all routinely called ‘interventions’—a bland word, whose only saving grace comes from having ‘inter’ up front to flaunt its modernity.   

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And yet, it is precisely in this hyper-interconnected modern world of interventions that we are constantly being interrupted and interfered with: the inner realm of the mind numbed and drained of content; boarded up and put out for sale; silenced and quietly interred.