Natation (pronounced ney-tey-shuhn or na-tey-shuhn)
(1) The act of swimming
(2) The craft or skill of swimming.
1535-1545:
From the Latin natātiōn(em)
(nominative natātiō) (a swimming; a swimming-place) noun of action
from the past-participle stem of natāre (to swim), from the primitive Indo-European root sneh & neh- (to flow, to swim). The
–ion suffix was from the Middle English -ioun,
from the Old French -ion, from the
Latin -iō (genitive -iōnis).
It was appended to a perfect passive participle to form a noun of action
or process, or the result of an action or process. The construct of the Latin natātiō was natō (swim,
float), the construct being the frequentative of nō + -tiō.
Nō was
used in the sense of “to swim” or “to” and as a poetic device “to sail”,
“to flow”, “to fly”) and was from the Proto-Italic snāō, from sneh-yé-ti
& neh-yé-ti, from sneh & neh- (to flow, to swim). It
was cognate with the Ancient Greek νάω (náō). In English, “swimming lessons” sound mundane
but to English-speaking ears, the French leçons
de notation sounds poetic; a French swimming pool is a natatorium. Natation, natatorium,
natator & natatory are nouns and natant, natatorial & natational are adjectives;
the noun plural is natators.
Although notation
does have some technical uses in scientific publications, it’s most often used as
a poetic or literary device to refer to swimming, floating in water or some
imagery of floating, flying, drifting etc.
In poetry, as well as often searching for words which rhyme or suit the
rhythm of the text, poets need to avoid repetition unless obviously it’s a deliberate
device; even in epic-length works a too frequent appearance of a distinctive
word can be jarring. Natation can hardly
be thought a common word so a poet must be sparing in its use; they might speak of a subject’s slow notation through their Beoetian life. Boeotia was a region in Ancient Greece and the
cosmopolitan Athenians would disparage the place’s inhabitants as provincial, dull
and lacking cultural refinement (their district was one of the “flyover” states
of Antiquity). Nor need the word be applied
only to people because the “silent notation” taken by the reflection of a full
moon gliding across the silvery waters of a placid lake is an image evocative enough
to appeal to any poet. While in verse natation
can be used of those actually splashing about, it’s as metaphor or symbolism that
it’s more effective: a life can be a natation through the endless tides of life
which can wash one onto sharp rocks or a tranquil shore. Structurally, it is too just another word and
one which a poet must use to construct the sounds which build the lyrical
quality of the text and the act of notation is not an abstraction because just
as a swimmer can flow with the currents, they can be compelled also to fight those
tides and sometimes those battles are lost; often swimmers drown in the depths.
Two natators in a natatorium. Mosaic floor of a bath from the Roman villa of Pompianus in Cirta, Algeria, fourth century AD. In historical writing, being a word of Latin origin, it can be used to add a sense of authenticity: a discussion of a Roman mosaic showing athletes or soldiers swimming might mention it being a depiction of a "natatorial setting".
Patterns of use (lower case, initial capital & all capitals): Because of the way Google harvests data for their ngrams, they’re not literally a tracking of the use of a word in society but can be usefully indicative of certain trends, (although one is never quite sure which trend(s)), especially over decades. As a record of actual aggregate use, ngrams are not wholly reliable because: (1) the sub-set of texts Google uses is slanted towards the scientific & academic and (2) the technical limitations imposed by the use of OCR (optical character recognition) when handling older texts of sometime dubious legibility (a process AI should improve). Where numbers bounce around, this may reflect either: (1) peaks and troughs in use for some reason or (2) some quirk in the data harvested.
No comments:
Post a Comment