The true story of 'true' - Gina Cooke

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The older the word, the longer (and more fascinating) the story. With roots in Old English, 'true' shares etymological ancestors with words like betroth and truce...but also with the word tree. In fact, trees have been metaphors for steadfastness and faithfulness for as long as the word true has defined the same qualities. Gina Cooke describes the poetic relationship between 'tree' and 'true.'

Lesson by Gina Cooke, animation by Brad Purnell.

Everyone knows that stories

are made up of words,

from short poems

to epic novels.

But did you know

that a single word itself

can tell an entire story?

You see, just as we can look at a story's plot,

setting,

and characters,

we can also study the history

of an individual word,

where it developed,

and the cultures and people

who helped shape it.

Looking into the story of a word

is like counting the rings of a tree.

Newer words, like Google

or cyborg,

have shorter stories.

But the older the word,

the longer the story

and the more it stands to reveal to us

not only about itself,

but about ourselves and our history.

The oldest words in present-day English

are those that come from Old English,

the ancestor of our modern language

whose first seeds were planted

about 1500 years ago.

Compared to languages like Greek or Chinese

that date back thousands of years,

English is just a sapling in the lexical forest.

But the stories of its words

often start long before English itself took root.

One such word is the familiar word true,

as in true stories.

Let's take a look.

True usually means factual, correct,

or faithful to reality.

It can also mean exact,

properly positioned,

upright,

or straight.

A true friend is loyal,

reliable,

faithful,

and steadfast.

The word true is a simple word,

and we can add some affixes

to grow its family tree

with words like truer,

truest,

truly,

truth,

and untruth.

But if we go in the other direction

to look at the roots of true itself,

we find even more relatives

further up the family tree.

The words trust,

bethroth,

and truce

all derive from the same source as true,

and these words all denote faithfulness

or confidence.

A thousand years ago,

the word true looked and sounded

different than it does today.

In several Old English dialects,

the word treow was a noun

that meant good faith or trust,

a pledge or a promise.

But it also had another definition,

tree,

and that's no coincidence.

If we trace the roots back even farther,

we find that both meanings

derive from a common origin,

where some of the earliest expressions

of the concept of truth

were associated with the uprightness of an oak,

the steadiness of a silver birch,

and the fidelity of an orchard baring fruit

year after year.

This may sound like a stretch at first,

but trees are the oldest living organisms

on this planet.

Some that would have been called treow long ago

still stand today.

The Fortingall Yew in Scotland

is more than 2,000 years old.

A Californian Bristlecone Pine

is more than 5,000.

And Utah's Pando-quaking Aspen Grove

has a single root system

that dates back more than 80 millennia.

Trees have also held a sacred place

in many cultures throughout history.

The Celtic peoples

who first inhabited the British Isles

believed that trees housed deities.

And, in fact, the ancient Druids take their name

from the same ancient root as tree.

Planting a tree is itself an act of faith

and commitment.

Not only are trees upright and prototypically straight,

but they are actual, solid, and real,

something you can see and touch.

And they are as reliable and steadfast to us today

as they were a millennium ago,

nurturing us,

sheltering us,

and providing the pages of our books.

Philosophers and poets,

people in search of the truth,

have often sought it in trees.

"What did the tree learn from the Earth

to be able to talk with the sky?"

asked Pablo Neruda.

"A tree falls the way it leans,"

says an old proverb.

Just as trees mark our landscapes

and witness our histories,

the stories of words landscape our language,

capturing the rains and sunshine of generations

and sending roots and branches far and wide.

As there is a whole orchard in a single seed,

there is a whole story in a single word,

and that's the truth.