In Zen Buddhism, the term all one refers to a state of enlightenment that’s the opposite of isolated and alone. The word alone, however, comes from the idea of “all on one’s own.” The word alone also gives us lone, lonely and lonesome, through a process called misdivision. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Alone Etymology”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hello, Martha. This is Art from San Diego.
Hi, Art.
Hi, Art. What’s up?
Well, I’ve got kind of an odd entry point into my question for you.
I’ve been a student of Zen Buddhism for a long time,
And the other day I came across the word alone,
And for some reason I looked it up somewhat superficially in Wikipedia,
And I saw that it derived from the word all one.
And I smacked my forehead and said, oh, my gosh, one of the key observations of Zen is that people feeling that they are alone cause a lot of harm and suffering to themselves and others.
And one of the key breakthroughs or enlightenment states is to feel that you’re all one.
So I’m saying, oh, my gosh, Martha and Grant have got to tell me how our culture has changed all one to almost its opposite alone.
The original meaning of all one, though, wasn’t like the Zen Buddhist interpretation of all one, all being one.
What it was more like was all on one’s own.
So you were a single person.
It wasn’t about being part of a greater whole.
All right.
So my next association with that was, oh, my gosh, that’s like that word atonement,
Which has six or seven different meanings, but all of which have to do with making recompense and feeling guilty instead of being at one.
Would that be another kind of a cultural zapper?
Well, a tone does come from at one, just jamming those two words together.
Very interesting.
Yeah, there’s another path to take when we think about the connections that these words have,
And that is that the words lone, lonely, and lonesome actually come from alone.
And so when we think about all one turning into alone, then turning into lonely and lonesome and lone,
Then we actually have this strange etymological tree
Where all of these words that seem kind of like ordinary English,
We can pick out the moments when they appeared.
Yeah, I can see the continuity there.
There’s another interesting thing linguistically happening with all one.
Spelling was really ambiguous, shall we say,
Or very creative in the early days of English.
And so sometimes they would spell it as one word or two words with one L or two Ls.
And what happened was eventually they became jammed together in one word
With one L, and then people did what’s called misdivision.
They thought that maybe the word actually was a-loan, L-O-N-E,
And so that’s how we get the lone and lonesome and lonely now
Because people misdivided.
They thought it was the article A with the word loan.
Fascinating.
Not even Samuel Johnson could halt that far.
No.
The human imagination could it.
No, those kinds of misdivisions are less likely now that spelling is more standardized,
But they still happen occasionally.
You’ll see them definitely in the writing of children.
All right.
Well, thanks, Art.
Thanks for calling.
Really appreciate it.
Thanks for your answers.
All right.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
