Sometimes when I’m thinking about the etymology of a word, I try to think about it in terms of flavors. So, for this month’s word, what are the flavors that constitute ‘diligence’?
The primary flavors for me are endurance, patience, precision, and following the rules. Diligence is highly ordered, a methodical act. One can be diligent in their pursuit of a goal, whether that’s going to the gym three times a week, tracking their hours of sleep, or achieving the milestones that will position them for a promotion. Due diligence is done on companies. We frequently pair ‘diligently’ as an adverb modifying verbs like ‘worked,’ ‘prepared,’ or ‘planned’. In simple, only semi-humorous terms, diligent is a Type A kind of word.
But wait. If we go to its history, we find this delicious quote: “Sense evolved through time from ‘love’ through ‘attentiveness’ to ‘carefulness’ to ‘steady effort.’” The flavor of ‘love’ to me is not a Type A kind of word. It’s ever-shifting, all-encompassing, everything everywhere all at once. So how do we go from that to a word we now most frequently associate with accountants and lawyers pouring over minutiae on company books?
The word diligence is composed of the prefix dis (apart from) + legere (to choose, gather). Its earliest sense then, in Latin, could be translated as ‘to select’ or ‘pick out.’ It is not a far move to go from that sense to diligere, ‘to single out, esteem, prize, love, aspire to.’ Like our exploration of temple, the word shares a base principle: that the act of separating from the whole endows the separated with a sense of the sacred. What we focus on is what’s special (which creates a beautifully impossible question to answer: do we focus on it because it is special or by focusing on it does it become special?). This calls to mind Mary Oliver’s refrain: “to pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.”
In the above quote, we perhaps see the hint of how the word evolves in the direction that it does. Love is many things, and one of them is undeniably attentiveness. We set the object of our love aside, we endow it with attention. This is how we make it special, make it central to our lives. The stretch comes in bridging ‘attentiveness’ to ‘carefulness.’ My guess is that the connective tissue is temporal: when we pay close attention we slow down, we act with more intention, we are less careless or hasty. This becomes a kind of care-fullness, to be literally ‘full’ of ‘care’ in relation to the object or special attention. Finally, this evolves into ‘steady effort’, steadiness being the meaning carried over or already established in prior senses, and ‘effort’ being a new flavor. While we tend to have a more negative flavor around the word effort in the modern day, I think we would do well here to instead return to the sentiment in Oliver’s quote: our proper work, our effort is in attention.
While each of these steps, in examining and thereby trying to connect the evolving meaning of the word may seem too easy, like a sleight of hand, we can also step back from the micro-transitive nature to just equate the beginning sense with the final sense: love is steady effort. Anyone who has been in a long term relationship is likely to agree with this assessment. Sometimes love carries itself, and sometimes love is carried on a by-product of its own making.
So maybe, in the final analysis, diligence is not in fact such a cold, clean word, but a deeply romantic sentiment, if we only know where to look.
Footnote on the images:
As you will have noticed, Limns has dipped its toes in the DALL-E waters. For those who know me, you may find it utterly hilarious that I of all people am on Chat GPT, but there were too many delightful parallels between the act of digging around in etymology to kind of ‘co-create’ with history a philosophical synthesis or interpretation of a concept, and the undeniably extraordinary act of creation that DALL-E is up to. As image generation evolves (and my understanding of how to prompt it better evolves) the style of imagery on these posts will concurrently shift. I find this externalized humility towards evolution beautiful. I hope you do too.