The first etymology I ever wrote about was the word ‘manipulate.’ I was a senior in college, and I spent the final three months of the semester sleeping on the couch of two close friends that lived near campus. One of my friends was studying design, and was already starting to be recognized for her outsized talent. Accordingly, she had been nominated for a fellowship, and needed to write an artist’s statement.
Somehow (the details escape me now), the focus of the statement centered around the word manipulate. I was in the midst of studying Latin, and I immediately recognized the root of manus, or hand. The recognition sparked an opening in my consciousness, the flash of delight and curiosity that for me so often arrives with diving into a word and then returning to the world with a slightly altered lens. We went downstairs to get Sapporo’s and gummies, and then spent hours discussing it.
Manipulate comes from the Latin Manus (hand) + Plere (to fill). This creates manipulus (handful, sheath, bundle), and later the French Manipule (handful). Today, its primary definition is still to “handle in a technical or skillful way,” but its secondary, and far more used definition, is to “control or influence in an unfair, clever, or unscrupulous way.”
How do some words, with seemingly innocent or innocuous origins, come to have negative underlying associations? And what does filling your hands have to do with maliciously influencing others?
An interesting entry point is to think about humans’ mixed relationship to hands. On the one hand (pardon the pun), we recognize hands (specifically opposable thumbs) as what delineate us from the animal kingdom. They enable us to hold tools, shape weapons, and eat in a more efficient way. Hands fundamentally alter how we navigate the world. This is not limited just to survival, but also to identity construction. Hands make the creation of art possible. They also enable us to hold another person’s hand.
But there’s a flip side to this. Hands elevate us from our roots, from the perimeters of animal behavior. They pose the issue of potentiality: when we are free to do more, what will we do with that freedom?
The choice in how we enact our ‘human-ness’ can be further examined through another Latin etymology about hands: dextra and sinistra. Dextra means right hand, while sinistra means left hand. Sinistra is the root for our word ‘sinister.’ Let’s set aside, for the moment, the problematic history of condemning left handed people and instead consider the convenient implications of morally splitting the body.
By doing this, we get a neat, binary distinction. Hands are endowed with our human power and potential, but the fact that we have two of them gives us a physical embodiment of choice. Will we use that power in the ‘right’ way, or in a sinister way?
It seems, given our contemporary associations with the word manipulate, that we’ve come to err on the side of suspicion. The filling of hands, the manipulation of material, thought, or feeling, has a negative ring to it. But this need only be the case if we start from a place of assuming the desire to alter something is negative. When we look at the artist’s task, specifically, isn’t manipulate the perfect word for what we do? Isn’t it true that only by gathering and transforming via artistry the raw material of experience, observation and the physical world that we are able to derive something from it?
In that sense, don’t we manipulate in order to see more clearly?
PS--the art accompanying this post was supplied by none other than the friend with whom I originally discussed the word. Enjoy, and please check out her prolific and ever-impressive career at https://www.lirona.me
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Maybe the difference between creative manipulation and its ‘sinister’ sibling lies in what it is that is being manipulated. We work with ('handle') physical materials, or ideas, or (in my case) photographic images, to express ourselves or meet a need. But when we manipulate other sentient beings, we are treating them as objects rather than as subjects with their own vision and agency.