Origin of the Term Byzantine

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Phil from Appleton.

Hey there, Phil. What’s going on?

Hi, Phil.

Hi. Well, recently I heard a newscaster use the word Byzantine to describe our medical healthcare system in the U.S. And I can understand the complexity of the medical system, but I wonder how Byzantine came to refer to both complex and being duplicitous in an adjective.

Duplicitous. That’s a great word, duplicitous.

Yeah, for the health care system.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Are you having struggles with the health care system?

Are you having trouble with an insurance company or something?

I’m a physician, so I always have trouble with insurance companies.

Gotcha.

I see.

You’re an insider.

You have a new insight.

Well, Phil, what do you know about the Byzantine Empire?

Well, only that it was in Constantinople. Little more than that, Martha, I can’t say I know much about it. It was around for a long time, starting in what, about 330 A.D., I think, and going for hundreds and hundreds of years.

And I know that they were notorious in that empire for having a very, very, very complicated and convoluted kind of government. And they handed out titles sort of like Oprah hands out cars. You know, you get a title, you get a title.

So there were all these titles that people had, all these nobles and friends of nobles. And they would get these long titles like all super first August one. I mean, that was, you know, they just kept adding the little prefixes on there.

And so it was really, really complicated, really intricate and complex. And I think that the word Byzantine describing that kind of government probably captured the imagination of historians in the West, just in part because it was so different, so other, so strange.

And I’m not sure, though, that their government was any more complicated than anybody else’s.

Yeah, it’s always easy to look at the other side and go, oh, well, they’re worse than we are.

Yeah.

We’re pretty awesome.

I understand our level of hierarchy and system problems and wheels within wheels.

Yeah.

And I think, you know, too, the word Byzantine has been influenced by the fact that you think of Byzantine art, and a lot of that is incredibly elaborate, incredibly intricate.

Oh, certainly intricate and complicated.

Yeah.

Beautiful in its way.

Yeah.

So that’s usually what I think of Byzantine, but there is that element too.

Byzantine.

Well, that’s initially what I thought in terms of their artwork is pretty intricate, I guess is the best description. But I guess just in the back of my mind, it still had more of a negative connotation of Byzantine rather than just purely extremely complicated.

You know, almost that the complications are manufactured to keep people from understanding it.

I was going to say, that sounds sort of like the medical system, doesn’t it?

I won’t admit to that, Martha, no.

Well, no, no, not the caregivers, but I mean the language and all those forms. If you can know the system, then you can game the system, right?

Exactly.

And so you’ve got to put in these roadblocks and these checks to stop people from using a system to its utmost.

Okay, well, I think we’ve given you a Byzantine answer. I don’t know if that’s opaque or just complicated, but that’s interesting.

I think it’s intricate.

I think it’s intriguing.

Very good.

Thanks for calling, Philip.

Bye now. Thank you.

Bye.

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