Latin and Greek

"Television? The word is half Greek and half Latin. No good will come of it." This bon mot attributed to C.P. Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian, in 1928 applies to the word automobile as well. Marshall McLuhan more or less began media studies with his account of these technologies in The Mechanical Bride and Understanding Media. His tradition is alive and well with Paul Virilio (though he likes his Greek dromophilia and picnolepsia).

For the next generation, especially the first generation of (frequently male) internet scholars, Latin roots mattered: community, communication, commonwealth, commons. . . .

For the newer and largely female generation, Greek fights back: synaesthesia, synapses, sympathy, syncretism . . . with a much more embodied but still utopian view of the world.

Sitting down to write a preface to the 2nd edition of Jussi Parikka's Contagions, it's interesting to note how Latin, of a slightly different inflection, fights back: contact, conflict, and the horrors of the contemporary. Perhaps this means nothing at all. Or perhaps it marks the conditions for a new connective synecdoche.