In 1862, US Congress passed the Homestead Act, which gave people 160 acres of land for a small fee and granted them title after five years if they “improved” the property. The act began a new era in American history, giving people the promise of being able to move away from civilization and its irksome rules and to stake out a life on their own property.
Suppose you wanted to do the same today: move away from civilization and its irksome rules and stake out a life on your own property. Where would you go? You might think Alaska, but although it was the last state to have homesteading, that ended in 1986.
The new-to-me word this week provides one option: seasteading. This describes a movement to establish communities at sea. In an ideal scenario, seasteading communities are outside the territorial waters of any country (more than 200 miles offshore) and are thus subject to the no one’s laws except the ones that the community creates for itself.
The idea of running a community offshore is not a new one. Entrepreneurs used to run “gambling ships” outside US territorial waters that offered (then-illegal) gambling. L. Ron Hubbard (of Dianetics/Scientology fame) ran a community of four ships as something called Sea Org that wandered the oceans.
The term seasteading seems to go back at least to 1998. An early advocate, Wayne Gramlich, claims in a paper to have invented the term, which he consciously modeled on homesteading: “I call this technology a seastead, for `SEA homeSTEAD’.” (He might not have been the only person to hit on this term.) Although the term is nominally neutral, in practice, seasteading is strongly associated with libertarianism and crypto-coin enthusiasts who envision utopian outposts that are free of external government.
I was pleased to see that the seasteading community is all in on using sea- to form new words. Joe Quirk, who’s the president of the Seasteading Institute, refers to himself as a seavangelist. Proponents talk about seavilization, as you can see by searching for the #Seavilization hashtag on Twitter.
Many people who took advantage of the Homestead Act in the 1860s found that it wasn’t what they had hoped for. Large swaths of the American West are effectively a desert, and it proved difficult to make a living off 160 acres. Although there have been various efforts to seastead, it, too, has run into difficulties, both logistical and legal. Like the American West, the ocean can be an unforgiving environment. Proponents seem undaunted. Stay tuned.
For origins this week, something made me look into the etymology of the word intelligence. One of the results of looking into this is that I learned (or was reminded) that intelligence has several definitions:
- The faculty of understanding. People have intelligence, and rocks don’t (I assume).
- Quickness or superiority of understanding. Intelligence as distinct from dullness.
- Information, especially of tactical value, like spy stuff.
- A (good or bad) level of understanding or relationship between people or parties (“he himself had done his best to procure a good intelligence between [Great Britain and Prussia]”).
- An intelligent spiritual being, like an angel.
I don’t think I was previously aware of the last two meanings. To my surprise, the “understanding between people” sense is attested as late as the 1950s. The “spiritual being” sense of intelligence survives today in the idea of aliens; it still refers to ethereal beings with faculties of comprehension, just to a different kind.
Ok. English got intelligence in early medieval times from Norman French and Latin, no surprise. (Great cite from 1475: “It excedyth myn intellygens.”)
The Latin word intellegentia referred to “understanding, knowledge” or to “taste, skill, power of discernment.” The last couple of senses are the ones most directly derived from the underlying roots. Ultimately there was a verb intelligere that was made up of inter (“between”) and legō (“to select”). So to have intelligence is to be able to discern or choose between, which then implies comprehension. The legō part comes from an ancient root (long before Latin and Greek) that meant “to gather,” which evolved into senses like “to speak” (lecture), “word” (neologism, logic, lexicography), and “story” (trilogy), to name just a few descendants.
While I was looking up intelligence, I saw a reference to the word intelligencer. This means “bringer of news or information, messenger,” which by extension has sometimes been used as the name of a newspaper or book. Seattle residents might be more familiar with this word than folks elsewhere because one of our newspapers is the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The P-I, as it’s called locally, is also the source of a landmark neon sign that has a globe with the slogan “It’s in the P-I” orbiting it. Although the print newspaper is no more, the publication still exists online, so Seattleites still get to enjoy the word intelligencer and of course we still have our beloved P-I globe.
Like this? Read all the Friday words.