The Attention Chronicles pair strange facts with small stories to answer two questions: How does anyone reclaim wandering attention in our fast-paced, wired, and wounded times; and, for paid subscribers, what feats of attention and ritual can turn a house with an unquiet history into a home? Today’s post is inspired by a phone call with a friend, a resilient, confident, and powerful soul whose thoughts have been temporarily overtaken by sadness and regret. After our talk, my attention fixed on the word “mistake.” Thanks to centuries of meaning, the word implies a way up and out. Dear reader, if you ever mistake your way, I hope you remember to think of it medievally. Let none of us squander our attention on regret.
I. The Verb Came First
What a glorious day it must have been in Olde England when some predecessor of Geoffrey Chaucer put the verb “take” together with the prefix, “mis-” (“unfavorably”), allowing errant mortals to describe what was happening when they mis-took each other’s meaning or strayed on the way to heaven. The verb arrived in written English well before the noun, so for awhile it was impossible to make a mistake, but easy to mis-take a sweet cake from the grocer and land before a judge.
The word “mystake” is first found written in the 1382 translation of the Latin Bible into English. In Deuteronomy 5:11, Moses is reviewing the Ten Commandments with the Israelites a second time before reaching the Promised Land when he warns, in the words of the fourteenth-century English translator,
Þou shalt not mystake þe name of þe lord þy god ydullich.
To write that with modern “th”s and “ly”s, the line reads, “Thou shalt not mistake the name of the Lord thy God idly/idolly.”
Still more familiarly: “Thou shalt not mis-take the name of thy Lord God in vain” (Deuteronomy 5:11, Wycliffe, BibleGateway.com).1
This sense of mistake, meaning “To take improperly, wrongfully, or in error,” was only used, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), for about three hundred years. It is reportedly obsolete.
That’s a shame. It would be handy to have this meaning back. What do you do after you mis-take a sweet cake? You pay your fine and move on with life. After you mis-take the name of thy Lord? You offer penance and try not to aggrieve your Lord the same way twice.
Today we know mistake as a noun, meaning “a misconception,” “a thing incorrectly done or thought,” or “an error of judgement” (“Mistake,” OED).
Oof. Every one of those definitions is hard to bear. It can take a long time to recover peace of mind and self-image after a big thing incorrectly done. We lug our nouns around with us. How slow to erode are granite blocks, marble monuments, and errors of judgment?
Before we know it, we drive our mistakes into sand up to the axles and wonder if we will ever move again.
Oh for an obsolete verb to occur in time and be done; for a thing to be mis-taken, corrected, and returned; to have mis-taken the way yesterday and look forward to taking a different way tomorrow.
Let us bring back the fourteenth-century verb, to take unfavorably, imperfectly, and humanly; to mis-take.
II. Trial and Error
The first time my friend called after the move, I wished briefly to be in her place. I expected to hear how relieved she was to finally live in her region of choice, to have shaken the dust of her misfit home off her shoes, to be making a fresh start with her family.
“I made a mistake,” she said, halting my garrulous greeting.
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