David, a lawyer from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, subscribes to the Lexis Legal News Brief, and wonders about the connection between lex meaning “law,” and the lex which refers to “words.” While lexis refers to the total stock of words in a language, lexicon means the vocabulary of an individual or a specific branch of knowledge. They all come from an ancient root leg-, having to do with the idea of “collecting” or “gathering,” which also gives us the suffix -logy, as in the study of something. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Lex in Law and Language”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
How are you? This is David from Cape Cod.
Hi, David. Welcome to the show.
Hi, David.
Thank you. Nice to talk with both of you.
Nice talking with you. What’s up?
Well, I listen to your podcast every week,
And a question occurred to me recently that I thought perhaps you could help me with.
I’m a lawyer, and I subscribe to an online legal library service called Lexis, L-E-X-I-S.
I’m familiar with the word or the prefix lex or L-E-X frequently in my business.
That refers to law or the law.
In fact, in my Black’s Legal Dictionary, there’s about five pages of terms that begin with lex.
But I hear the term that you use often of lexicon or similar words, which refers to words and not law.
So I wondered if there was a connection or a common root to the lex, which means law, and the lex, which means words.
Yeah, there is a connection there, fortunately.
It comes ultimately from a Greek root, which might be pronounced leg.
Martha can correct me if I’m wrong.
Legane?
Yeah, and it means to speak.
Yeah, and ultimately to gather.
It goes all the way back to the root that means to gather, like collect.
And you can sense in the different words that this root has appeared in in English,
You can sense there’s always this idea of an exchange of information.
I mean, that’s the very broadest umbrella sense of this.
But in the specific words like dialogue, we’re actually talking about speech between two people.
It occurs even, and this surprises people, it’s the root also of the L-O-G-Y or the O-L-O-G-Y.
That’s the end of words like psychology or geology, where we were talking about studying something.
Geology is the study of the earth.
But maybe what we’re really talking about is discussing the earth, right?
But we have to be careful here when we’re talking about this root, which ultimately means speech or word, that we don’t fall victim to the etymological fallacy.
This is where somehow we keep deferring to the oldest meaning of the word and suggesting that somehow that’s the best or the purest.
And this might be counterintuitive to a lawyer who relies heavily upon case law and where sometimes the precedent, the earliest precedent, is the one that matters most.
Yeah. So it comes from the same word, it’s just split off into two separate branches of meaning?
Yeah, that’s right. They entered English at different times.
They entered the different European languages at different times.
In my field, in language and dictionaries and linguistics,
The lexis is the total stock of words, all of the vocabulary that are in a language.
And the lexicon is the vocabulary of a person or a language or a branch of knowledge,
A little different. We need to differentiate those in our fields just so we know what we’re
Referring to. Yeah, this is one huge family of words. I mean, the Greek word logos,
Which is related to these. It’s a logo. And eulogy comes from that as well.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And trilogy. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And in scripture, you know,
In the beginning was the word. That word in Greek is logos. I mean, it’s all over the place.
What I love about this root, and I’m so glad that you brought it up,
Is that usually when we talk about words that last in a language,
Ones that are impervious to the ravages of time,
We talk about parts of the body or the terms for our relationships, mother and father.
We talk about the weather, these things that are universal to the human experience.
But it’s really interesting to find that at least with this one word,
That speech has been so important to human beings in the modern era
That the root continues to flourish, not only in English,
In every language that has any kind of connection to Greek.
I love it.
Even in Russian.
I understand your point about the oldest isn’t necessarily the most important,
But is it originally of Greek origin?
Yes, as far as we know.
As far back as the best etymologists have found.
Although I’d love it if they found that there was some Indo-European root.
But as far as I know, there isn’t a confirmed one.
It always has the little asterisk next to it
Where they suggest that it might have existed,
But there’s no proof of it.
Yeah, they’ve reconstructed it.
Well, thank you very much.
Yeah, our pleasure.
Thanks for calling.
Okay.
Bye, David.
Bye-bye.
