Words with the be- prefix like beholding deserve special consideration because the prefix is highly generative and its various senses deeply intuitive to us even a thousand years removed from Beowulf. For one thing, we know, prereflectively and without any analytical apparatus to explain our judgment in this, that the be- prefix has an entirely different sense in each of the words behead, bemoan, befuddle, befoul, and befriend.
Similarly, we still coin neologisms with be- and somehow know effortlessly what they mean without a moment’s pondering:
· The Passenger, also begoggled, comes in. (George Bernard Shaw, 1914)
· And all the trim and not so trim ladies who have been be-trousered begin thank God once more to be be-skirted. (Ogden Nash, 1936)
· Autograph albums with a lock of limp and colourless beribboned hair lolling out between the thick black boards. (Dylan Thomas, 1954)
· Prehistoric bedragonned times / Crawl that darkness with Latin names. (Ted Hughes, 1960)
And we can easily play these things for laughs, which to my mind really attests most of all to great evocative power, thus Sterne, in Tristram Shandy (1759): ”All bevirtued, bepictured, bebutterflied, and befiddled.”
So “beholding” deserves serious attention as a potential case where an author is able to exploit be- as a way of reinvigorating an old word or reinvesting the familiar with a more nuanced and unfamiliar sense. We would do that today if it suited us; why would the Cloud-author be any different?
Here’s an entirely crazy speculation springing from an effort to imagine what might be going on in the Cloud-author’s mind as he conscripts the word beholding to a technical purpose that might even be new. He’d have to be dealing with making the word “sound right” for a more or less novel idea that beholding does not already encompass, but which it plausibly might with a slight make-over.
One of several things you can do with the prefix be- is to make the root meaning figurative, as seems to be the leading hypothesis for the historical origin of behold. But another thing you can do with be- is make an intransitive verb become transitive (e.g., to moan takes no object, but one can bemoan one’s fate). “Behold” is transitive as we use it today. It turns out that an old sense of the verb “to hold” is intransitive. We still detect this in the word “holdings” (of possessions, as in holding company). The OED defines this usage as “Of things: To maintain connexion; to remain fast or unbroken; not to give way or become loose”; and Chaucer attests to it: “Yit halt thin ancre and yit thow mayst aryue.” A beholding is, of course a thing.
This transformation may best be effected upon a noun, making a verb of it; think of beholding as related to a place of refuge (a “stronghold”). For that matter, recall that we may be beholden to others for their hospitality.
I have no evidence at all that our author is doing this, and I do not have the skills with corpus linguistics or whatever it would take even to imagine a method for beginning to approach it seriously. What I want to do, instead, is tease out a more active sense for beholding. We aren’t just sitting watching the magician saw a lady in half as he says, “Behold!” There is a sense of engagement implicated in this word, or ought to be.
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Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy
Words with the be- prefix like beholding deserve special consideration because the prefix is highly generative and its various senses deeply intuitive to us even a thousand years removed from Beowulf. For one thing, we know, prereflectively and without any analytical apparatus to explain our judgment in this, that the be- prefix has an entirely different sense in each of the words behead, bemoan, befuddle, befoul, and befriend.
Similarly, we still coin neologisms with be- and somehow know effortlessly what they mean without a moment’s pondering:
· The Passenger, also begoggled, comes in. (George Bernard Shaw, 1914)
· And all the trim and not so trim ladies who have been be-trousered begin thank God once more to be be-skirted. (Ogden Nash, 1936)
· Autograph albums with a lock of limp and colourless beribboned hair lolling out between the thick black boards. (Dylan Thomas, 1954)
· Prehistoric bedragonned times / Crawl that darkness with Latin names. (Ted Hughes, 1960)
And we can easily play these things for laughs, which to my mind really attests most of all to great evocative power, thus Sterne, in Tristram Shandy (1759): ”All bevirtued, bepictured, bebutterflied, and befiddled.”
So “beholding” deserves serious attention as a potential case where an author is able to exploit be- as a way of reinvigorating an old word or reinvesting the familiar with a more nuanced and unfamiliar sense. We would do that today if it suited us; why would the Cloud-author be any different?
Here’s an entirely crazy speculation springing from an effort to imagine what might be going on in the Cloud-author’s mind as he conscripts the word beholding to a technical purpose that might even be new. He’d have to be dealing with making the word “sound right” for a more or less novel idea that beholding does not already encompass, but which it plausibly might with a slight make-over.
One of several things you can do with the prefix be- is to make the root meaning figurative, as seems to be the leading hypothesis for the historical origin of behold. But another thing you can do with be- is make an intransitive verb become transitive (e.g., to moan takes no object, but one can bemoan one’s fate). “Behold” is transitive as we use it today. It turns out that an old sense of the verb “to hold” is intransitive. We still detect this in the word “holdings” (of possessions, as in holding company). The OED defines this usage as “Of things: To maintain connexion; to remain fast or unbroken; not to give way or become loose”; and Chaucer attests to it: “Yit halt thin ancre and yit thow mayst aryue.” A beholding is, of course a thing.
This transformation may best be effected upon a noun, making a verb of it; think of beholding as related to a place of refuge (a “stronghold”). For that matter, recall that we may be beholden to others for their hospitality.
I have no evidence at all that our author is doing this, and I do not have the skills with corpus linguistics or whatever it would take even to imagine a method for beginning to approach it seriously. What I want to do, instead, is tease out a more active sense for beholding. We aren’t just sitting watching the magician saw a lady in half as he says, “Behold!” There is a sense of engagement implicated in this word, or ought to be.
Like this: