‘You’re easily pleased.’ said my husband when I told him how satisfying I found a chance discovery. It was about green grass growing, and I’m still pleased with it.
Grow comes from an ancient Germanic root gro-. Green derives from the same source, and the greenery that grew was called grass, a third derivative from the root. Grass even shares an origin with the Latin gramen ‘grass’, which had an earlier form grasmen, the –men part being a suffix indicating a noun.
My simple satisfaction at these etymological connections is countered by a discomfort at the way growth is used. From a different perspective I share the opinion of Harold Wilson, who when prime minister in 1965 told the Oxford Times: ‘I am now fighting a losing battle on another word I dislike – growth – which had a certain medical and agricultural connotation.’
His objection was political, that ‘economic growth involves more purposeful work than leaving it to nature’. It is different from my husband growing a beard simply by not shaving, or St Paul saying: ‘I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase.’
The more common word for growing used to be waxing, now left to the moon. At the risk of more squashing remarks by my husband, I was glad to find that wax shares a derivation with the Latin augere ‘to increase’. And when we eke out things we use another word with the same source as augere.
What still annoys me is to hear people talk about growing a business or growing the economy. You can grow corn, but that does not entail making corn bigger; instead you cultivate it. This is the agricultural connotation Harold Wilson had in mind. For the economy, you need a different metaphor, of expanding it or building it up.
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