When our first child was just born, my husband returned from the phone call to my parents (and his? I only remember that he contacted mine) and reported my mother’s first reaction, “How is mch?” At the time I found Momi’s question so strange. I was fine! My world (the whole world’s!) was revolving around the baby I’d just given birth to, and he was fine, the most beautiful and wonderful thing in the world! It didn’t take me long (a few minutes, days? I cannot provide a timeline for that emotionally and physically chaotic part of my life) to realize: oh, Momi loves me as much as I love my baby, and I am her baby, still. My father’s, too. That realization gave me so much strength for years to come, and to this day.
Let’s take the next step. How much harder childbirthing must be for women (esp. girls) not in my situation. Often, also, for the men in their lives. So many truly fraught situations to imagine.
I’ve been wondering about the roots of the words – dementia, and demented. And wondered if TCF could actually be described as suffering from dementia, if he were indeed, described as being demented, already?
So –
The term “demented” derives from the Latin “de,” to undo, plus “mens,” meaning mind. Thus, to say that a person has dementia is to say that he or she has a disease process that “undoes the mind,” whereas to say that a person is “demented” is tantamount to saying that he or she no longer has a mind.
The word “dementia” also comes from the Latin word demens, which means “out of one’s mind” or “madness”. The word is made up of de-, meaning “without,” and mens (mind), meaning “senseless”.
Undo the mind? Without senses? With TCF, I’d go with Demented, and now with a brain disease process (Dementia), which wipes out any remaining senses that he still might have left.
Isn’t etymology fun? The PIE root *men is fluid in its derivatives, but most retain a connection between thinking/mind and memory. If you can get ahold of one, get the American Heritage Dictionary when it still contained Calvin Watkin’s Appendix on PIE roots. Historical linguists have made some of the entries there obsolete or questionable, but not many. “De” in Latin (via which English derivatives) signifies “down from” more than “out of,” I think, but same difference. Also (not apparent in Watkin’s Appendix but in Greek scholars’ work), *men contains the notion of intention, making lawyers’ mens rea a redundancy but also suggesting to us that our memory of the past is intimately tied to our goals for the future. You and I could have fun together.
