chaos

As I look around my office/spare room, I see a huge pile of unsorted laundry (one that I keep adding to), papers that need filing, empty cups of tea and a dog attempting to turn the aforementioned pile of laundry into his new bed.

It is, in short, chaos.

‘Chaos’ comes from an Ancient Greek word, χάος (kháos). But if you somehow time-travelled back to the days of togas, epic poetry and gods-impregnating-women-in-weird-ways (I’m looking at you, Zeus), and told the first person you met that your office (and kitchen, and bedroom, and bathroom) was ‘full of chaos’, they’d look at you quizzically. Because to them, chaos wasn’t a mess at all. It was a big old empty space.

To find out why, we need to take a look at Hesiod’s Theogony, a 1,022-line epic poem which he wrote around the 8th century BCE. Theogony is the foundational text for Greek mythology, detailing the origins, genealogy and succession of the gods. And it all starts with Chaos-with-a-capital-C, the very first thing to exist. But Chaos-with-a-capital-C wasn’t the noisy vortex of fire, wind and random rubbish you might be imagining right now. It was, simply, DUM DUM DUUUUMMMM…

… the Void.

No stars, no earth, no sky and definitely no laundry that needed putting away. Just a giant, empty space waiting for stuff to happen. A cosmic blank page, if you will.

(The etymology backs this up – if we trace ‘chaos’ back to its Proto-Indo-European root, we land on *ghen- or *ghei-, which means ‘to gape’ or ‘to yawn’.)

Chaos gets crowded

So how did this empty abyss turn into the ultimate disaster area? Well, we can blame another poet for that (damn poets), but a Roman one this time – Ovid. Ovid took one look at Hesiod’s 1,022 lines and decided that clearly wasn’t enough. His Metamorphoses, which he wrote around 8 CE, was approximately 11,995 lines of dactylic hexameter (yum). And even though his name is literally an anagram of ‘void’, he decided to redefine chaos as a confused, shapeless mass rather than an empty space. Ovid’s chaos involved all the raw elements of the universe – fire, water, earth and air – crammed in together like a university flat-share, fighting against one another in this overcrowded, messy and disorganised space.

‘Chaos’ elbowed its way into Middle English around the 14th to 15th century via Old French and Latin. At first, writers used it in the same sense as Hesiod, i.e. to refer to the void that existed before Creation (this also turns up in Genesis, where the Earth was ‘without form, and void’). But Ovid’s hot mess was far too relatable to stay confined to Roman epic poetry. By the late 16th and early 17th centuries, English speakers had begun using ‘chaos’ to describe any state of utter confusion, disorder or turmoil.

Gus and his new laundry-based bed

The ultimate plot twist: Chaos Theory

Hesiod gave us chaos as an empty void. Ovid rebranded it as a crowded mess. Then 20th-century scientists flipped the word once more. In the 1960s, meteorologist Edward Lorenz entered numbers into a computer weather simulation built on strict physical laws. He rounded one number down slightly to save time (sort of – it’s more complicated than this, but this is a blog about words, not numbers), fully expecting that doing that wouldn’t really affect the result. Instead, that tiny tweak generated a completely different long-term forecast (AKA the butterfly effect). This proved that a system doesn’t need to be random to produce wild, unpredictable outcomes – it can follow strict, logical rules behind the scenes and still create results that look like a total mess on the surface.

Lorenz originally called this ‘deterministic nonperiodic flow’ (which sounds vaguely perimenopausal) as well as the equally snappy ‘sensitive dependence on initial conditions’. Thankfully, mathematicians (in my head they all look like Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park) later stepped in and rebranded it as Chaos Theory, presumably just because it sounds really cool.

So, the word ‘chaos’ has come full circle, from empty space to jumbled mess to structure inside an apparent muddle. Which means, as I look over at my dog sleeping peacefully in a pile of unsorted laundry, I can take comfort in the fact that it isn’t actually a disaster. It’s just a complex system with a hidden order I have yet to discover. (Or at least, that’s what I’ll be telling myself until I finally put the washing away.)

Dr Ian Malcolm using Chaos Theory to flirt with Laura Dern – much creepier than I remembered

candidate

I’m sure you know what a candidate is – someone who’s being considered for a job, position, award, honour, and so on. It doesn’t always have to be a person either, for example, ‘that wall is a prime candidate for a fresh coat of paint’ (said no-one ever, but you get the idea). But, why are these people (and walls) called candidates?

As usual, we need to take a quick trip back to ancient Rome for the answer. ‘Candidate’ comes from the Latin word candidatus, which literally means ‘clothed in white’. That’s because in ancient Rome, men running for public office (and it was only men, sadly – women were legally barred from holding public office, voting or joining the Roman Senate) wore a special bright-white toga called a ‘toga candida’. This brilliant white wool was supposed to symbolise purity, honesty and transparency of intention. Hmmm. The toga's name came from the Latin verb candere, meaning ‘to shine’ or ‘to be glowing white’ – that’s also where we get words like ‘candid’ and ‘candle’ from.

Someone wearing this white toga was referred to as a candidatus AKA ‘a white-robed person’. Over time, we stopped using the term to describe the clothing and started using it to refer to the person seeking office themselves. ‘Candidate’ entered Early Modern English in the 17th century straight from the Latin, eventually broadening to mean anyone applying for a position, award or political office.

(Slightly unpleasant aside – if you’ve ever had thrush, you might know that the fungus that causes it is called ‘candida’. That also comes straight from candidus, due to the fact that it grows in creamy-white colonies. Yuck. Thrush’s full Latin name is Candida albicans, with albicans coming from the Latin albicō meaning ‘to become white’. So that means our fungus is effectively called ‘whitey white’. I do love an etymology tautology.)

trivia

You know what trivia is – information that’s usually quite interesting and perhaps not that widely known, but probably not that important. Also a thing that you have to have ready when you’re female and you tell a man you’re interested in something, and he immediately asks you to prove it (actual conversations with male friends: ‘I’m a big Star Wars fan.’ ‘Really? How many forms of communication is C-3PO fluent in*?’ And: ‘I love watching tennis.’ ‘Yes? How many French Opens has Nadal won**?’)

The word ‘trivia’ comes from Latin and is the plural form of ‘trivium’ (but don’t ever use the singular version because you’ll sound like a dick), which means ‘place where three roads meet’. In ancient Rome, ‘trivium’ was used to refer to the three subjects of the beginners’ liberal arts course at university, which were: grammar (my fave), rhetoric (the study and practice of persuasive public speaking) and logic (a branch of philosophy focusing on valid and sound reasoning). While these might not seem that trivial to us, the fact that ‘trivium’ was the name for the beginners’ class is probably why it’s since evolved to refer to less important information.

I asked my robot overlord, ChatGPT, to tell me some trivia, and here’s what it said:

• Honey never spoils. Archaeologists have found pots of honey in ancient Egyptian tombs that are over 3,000 years old and still perfectly edible.

• The shortest war in history occurred between Britain and Zanzibar in 1896. It lasted only 38 minutes.

• The world’s oldest known recipe is for beer. It dates back to ancient Sumeria around 1800 BCE.

• The Eiffel Tower in Paris was originally intended to be a temporary structure, built for the 1889 World’s Fair. It was almost dismantled afterward but was saved because of its value as a radio transmission tower.

• The average person spends around six months of their lifetime waiting at red traffic lights.

• The national animal of Scotland is the unicorn.

• The world’s largest flower is the Rafflesia arnoldii, which can grow up to three feet in diameter and weigh up to 24 pounds. It’s also known for its distinctive smell, often likened to that of rotting flesh.

• Astronauts’ height can change in space. Without the force of gravity compressing their spines, they can grow up to 2 inches taller while spending extended periods in space.

*It’s six million. Which I did know.

** It’s 14. Which I didn’t know. But I do now, and I’m ready for you, men.