 certain old
gentleman, known to us only as Dr. Larkin, came down
each evening from his cabin on the hill overlooking the
campgrounds and told us stories. A hundred
grammar-schoolers sat around the open bonfire,
enthralled. He enriched his yarns with the wonders of
science and history. I remember several to this day (see
overkill).
Dr. Larkin liked words, too. Once he taught us that in ancient times the makers of low-quality pottery would pass off their wares by covering imperfections with wax. To distinguish premium grade pots and urns, the custom was to describe them as being crafted "without wax." The latin sine "without" and cera "wax" joined together to give us the word "sincere," Dr. Larkin said. The moral was plain. Modern dictionaries trace the word back to two Indo-European roots: (1) sem which by various pathways provided us with "same," "simultaneous," "similar," "simple," "seem"; and (2) ker- "to grow," from which a whole bunch of words grew - "create," "creole," "crescendo," "crescent," "crew," "accrue," "increase," "recruit." Thus, sincere gathers its meaning of "purity" from the notion "of one growth." Not nearly so satisfying to my mind as old Dr. Larkin's story. But that's not my problem with sincere.
Watch out, though. A child's mind acquires vocabulary more in the act of uttering than in hearing. Mistakes are abundant -- but understandable, are they not? At an indefinitely early age, I picked up the word "gratitude." It meant something like "transgression committed against a well-meaning benefactor." The only context I knew was an adult's sarcastic comment: "That's gratitude for you." Similarly, I first acquired "sincere" as a term of compassion, to be applied only in cases of noticeable imperfections. The source of the fallacy is elementary. Parents and other adults - well meaning, we may safely presume -- would say things like...
Summer camp and Dr. Larkin cleared that up. For a half a dozen years, I valued the term and used it properly. Then I became thirteen, the Age of Universal Rottenhood.
Soon enough others took up the practice. "Miss Preston, she's really sincere." Teachers were our favorite targets. "Who is most sincere, Miss Preston or Miss Hooker?" one might ask with exaggerated sincerity. The challenge was to keep a straight face until everybody else laughed. In our midst, a vogue expression flashed and gleamed. The verbal high jinks applied to a wide range of...
My memories from summer camp, though, were never sincere. Nor was old Dr. Larkin. .
|
earning a
language from scratch -- how do we do that? The
infantile mind ventures through a blizzard of
utterances, which float one by one out of the air and
cease. Our little cortexes somehow glom onto the stuff
before it melts, each flake indistinguishable at
first, yet curiously significant. The nascent mind
with little effort has the processing power to
classify the verbal drifts using software of
unthinkable sophistication. 
t started one
day when a teammate missed an easy lay-up. "You're so
sincere!" I taunted. The effect was wonderful. I felt
a surge of peer approval as we snickered together.
Repetition was not long in coming. A classmate was
stumped by a teacher's question. I piped up with,
"Yeah, but he's sincere." My popularity soared.