Words and Stuff
The curse of modern life is anxiety. That’s what I read today. I read it yesterday, too, and the day before – or so it seems.
Its causes are everywhere. Long hours of work, low wages, the gig economy, a housing shortage, drugs, crime, exams, Brexit, Christmas, our parents, our children – never mind Donald Trump, social media, climate change and the end of the world. And anxiety causes more anxiety. It turns us sour, boring and friendless. It robs us of our sleep. It makes us thin from anorexia. It makes us fat from compulsive eating. It weakens us and induces strokes, heart attacks and cancer. All these cause worry, aka anxiety. No wonder Edvard Munch’s The Scream has become the pre-eminent symbol of anxiety. Increasingly, we’re not living the dream: we’re living the scream.
Indeed, ‘anxiety’ is a relatively modern word. The OED says it first cropped up in 1525, when Thomas More put it in print, spelling it ‘anxietie’. ‘Anxious’, derived from anxius, the past participle of angere, ‘to choke, torture or cause pain’, appeared in 1623. Some 44 years later Milton used ‘anxious’ in Paradise Lost, which has been described by a modern critic as ‘Anxiety in Eden’, but neither ‘anxiety’ nor ‘anxious’ won its own entry in a lexicon until 1656, when Thomas Blount published his Glossographia. Before that, the Latin word anxietas, from which ‘anxiety’ derives, was translated variously as ‘anguysshe or sorrowe’, ‘care or heuynesse’ (heaviness). All of this suggests ‘anxiety’ didn’t become common as an English word until the turn of the 17th century.
‘Anxiety’ certainly doesn’t appear in the King James version of the Bible, prepared between 1604 and 1611. In Philippians 4:6, for example, a modern translation says, ‘Do not be anxious about anything,’ whereas the Authorised Version says, ‘Be careful for nothing.’ In Proverbs 12:25, a modern version has Solomon declaring, ‘An anxious heart weighs a man down,’ which the King James Bible puts as, ‘Heaviness in the heart of man maketh it stoop.’ In modern Luke 12:22, Jesus counsels ‘Do not be anxious about your life,’ which the Authorised Version puts as ‘Take no thought for your life.’
Shakespeare similarly shuns ‘anxiety’. Not in what he writes about, of course. Hamlet’s ‘To be, or not to be’ soliloquy packs more anxiety into 35 lines than most psychiatrists encounter in a lifetime. And anxiety is almost as common in Shakespeare’s plays as love, jealousy and betrayal, but he never felt the need to put that noun into any of his works, despite a prodigious vocabulary of over 31,000 words, some of which, such as ‘exist’ and ‘jovial’, had been recorded only a year or two before he used them.
Does that mean there was less anxiety in Shakespeare’s day? English certainly seemed to get along fine with ‘cares’ and ‘woe’ and ‘melancholy’ and ‘despair’ without any need for this more-encompassing word. In the 18th and 19th centuries, ‘anxiety’ came into more common use – so it was evidently meeting a need – and much later, in the mid-20th century, it was bolstered by the arrival of angst, a word common to Danish, Norwegian, Dutch and German. It is an old word, with origins in the eighth century, meaning a ‘general feeling of anxiety heightened by an awareness of the uncertainties inherent in the state of being human’. Its adoption plugged a gap in the world of psychoanalysis and existential philosophy.
It looks, therefore, as though the use of anxiety-words has increased and, since supply usually expands to meet demand, perhaps this is indeed the age of anxiety. How prescient was W H Auden when, in 1947, he wrote a poem with that title. And how wrong, alas, is every cheerful soul who declares, ‘No worries.’