Edification. This word chose me last year. Edification and I had a good run with her as my co-pilot while I navigated the rough roads of 2021 with both gloved hands on the wheel.
We had a conversation going 'most all the time.
I especially treasure the memory of one of our roadside picnics, complete with a flask of mint tea, elegant chicken salad sandwiches shaped by a tulip cookie cutter, and poetry recitation from Sonnets from the Portuguese in the shade of a moss-laden oak.
Edification is still with me but has moved to the back seat where she reads and occasionally comments on the scenery.
Yesterday a new word came and claimed me for its companion: propriety. This word leapt out of the page at me as if it were bolded, italicized, and three-dimensional. This does not seem proper behavior for this word--a puzzlement to be sure. At any rate, the reality was that it was just plain type in Wendell Berry's essay, "People, Land, and Community". To quote:
A farm can be too big for a farmer to husband properly or pay proper attention to. Distraction is inimical to correct discipline, and enough time is beyond the reach of anyone who has too much to do. But we must go farther and see that propriety of scale is invariably associated with propriety of another kind: an understanding of and acceptance of the human place in the order of Creation--a proper humility.
Berry is using propriety to mean "the quality or state of being proper or fitting," which is a definition I am eager to explore because it implies a timelessness that we do not get from the understanding of propriety as "the standard of what is socially acceptable in conduct".
Clearly, what is socially acceptable in conduct can and does change dramatically.
"Sad, but so true!" remarks Edification from the back seat, reaching for her dainty but well-worn copy of Famous Shakespeare Quotes.
This leads me to thinking about limits and right back to the quote above. I don't see how to understand "the quality or state of being proper or fitting" without taking into account the concept of limits.
If I am reading Berry correctly, a proper humility is what helps us recognize the limits.
"Gosh," I sigh to myself, involuntarily squeezing the steering wheel. "Much food for thought in this word."
"Indubitably," chirps Propriety from the passenger seat.
By the way, in my dictionary, Webster's Third New International Dictionary, copyright 1981, the first three definitions are obsolete usages; the fourth one is the one I want to study; the fifth is the "standard of what is socially acceptable in conduct" one.
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