Word Play - Conservative and liberal

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Friday, February 18th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

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The terms conservative and liberal mostly relate to politics these days. But wordsmith George Grant says that wasn’t always the case. Here’s this month’s Word Play.

GEORGE GRANT, COMMENTATOR: Henry Peacham was an English poet and writer best known for his 1622 guide to Renaissance arts and manners, The Compleat Gentleman. In it he defines the word “conservative” as “that power of promoting care, stewardship, learning, and healthfulness whilst opposing diminution, detriment, ignorance, and injury.” In one magnificent example of his Elizabethan and Jacobite prose he describes, “That spherical figure, as to all heavenly bodies, so it agreeth to light, as the most perfect and conservative of all others.”

According to Samuel Johnson, in his incomparable 1755 Dictionary, it is from this term and its incumbent meaning that the word “conservatory” is derived. Thus, he defines it as “A place where anything is kept in a manner proper to its peculiar nature, as fish in a pond, corn in a grainary, or culture in the heart of a student.”

The word “liberal” has a 14th century provenance from Frankish or Old French meaning “that which befits a free people, that which rightly belongs to the people, or that which is gracious, noble, munificent, generous, and unimpeded.” The word became a term of reproach during the 16th century meaning “free from restraint in speech or action.” Thus, Shakespeare intoned in Much Ado about Nothing, “Who hath indeed, most like a liberal villain, confess’d the vile encounters they have had a thousand times in secret.” But, by the 18th century the Enlightenment revived it in a positive sense, meaning “free from prejudice, not bigoted, or tolerant.” It came to be identified with political aspirations “tending in favor of liberty, freedom, and democracy.”

In the same way that conservatory is derived from conservative, the liberal arts are derived from liberal. First used in the 14th century, it was the name for “the seven attainments directed to intellectual enlargement, rather than immediate practical purpose, and thus deemed worthy of a free man.” These arts or attainments were divided into the trivium—grammar, logic, and rhetoric—and the quadrivium—arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. This is what James Russell Lowell called a Classical Education or a Liberal Education, “because it emancipates the mind from every narrow provincialism, whether of egoism or tradition, and is the apprenticeship that everyone must serve before becoming a free brother of the guild which passes the torch of life from age to age.”

Thomas Guthrie therefore wisely concluded, “As Christians we are necessarily both/and, not either/or: we are Conservative and Liberal. Our institutions are at their best when they are Conservatories rooted in the Liberal Arts.”

To reclaim our language is the first step toward reclaiming our legacy.

I’m George Grant.

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