Contemplating words

This morning I woke up to watch the opening ceremonies of the Olympics.  I missed about half of them but I did get to see the games declared open and the lighting of the Olympic flame.  The Olympics are fun to watch.  Sports competition is good knitting.  But watching the games made me think about words, and the way we define success, championship, hero, all words that are used often during the games, and how much these things really matter.

Champion comes from the the medieval Latin 'campio(n)'  or fighter, which itself has a root in the Latin 'campus' meaning level ground.  The Oxford Living Dictionary says to look at the source for the word camp, which reveals, that the Latin 'campus'  meant "‘level ground’, specifically applied to the Campus Martius in Rome, used for games, athletic practice, and military drill."

Next up, hero.  Hero is one heck of a word to source.  Hero seems to come via Latin from the Greek myth of Hero and Leander.  Leander would swim across the Hellespont each night to be with Hero till one night he died and Hero threw herself into the sea.  There is a very interesting Wikipedia entry about the word 'hero'  , that is going to tell you more than I ever could about it, which ends with a part about the psychology of the word that says "Roma Chatterji has suggested that the hero or more generally protagonist is first and foremost a symbolic representation of the person who is experiencing the story while reading, listening or watching;^[37] thus the relevance of the hero to the individual relies a great deal on how much similarity there is between the two. One reason for the hero-as-self interpretation of stories and myths is the human inability to view the world from any perspective but a personal one."

And then there is the word success, to succeed, which comes from the old Latin  "succedere ‘come close after’, from sub- ‘close to’ + cedere ‘go’."  

I am not an athlete, I never was.  It has always seemed to me that my feet are not connected to my head.  I am a terrible dancer with a good sense of rhythm.  There was that one great curling shot, that one great layup, that one great badminton smash.  Athletics is one long list of one good thing surrounded by a thousand little failings.  If I did yoga or tai chi in public, I would be the person who was constantly being corrected.  I know this because I have been that person.  I walk, and sometimes I wonder even about that.  But give me a pursuit where my head or my hands come into use, and I shine.  Not to say that I reach perfection in hand arts, but those are the things where I thrive. 

So if my way of seeing champions is different than most, if the things I use to define my own success are different, it shouldn't matter.  And yet, no one, in the real world sees knitting as succeeding.  There isn't anything heroic in reading a lot or enjoying stretching your mind just because you can and embroidery is never going to be an Olympic art.  

If my heros are people like Laura Aylor, Martina Behm, and Kate Davies it should surprise no one.  If my truest inspiration is the millions of people who post their projects on Ravelry or people like Kazuko Aoki and Trish Burr, that should surprise no one.  If people I consider champions are not people the rest of the world accredit as champions, that should surprise no one.  

And that brings me to my last word today, important, which comes from the Latin  importāre to be of consequence, weigh, Latin: to carry in., too often ascribed to the wrong things.

There are a lot of ways to be important, a lot of ways to be heroic, the be a champion, to succeed.  I will sit back and enjoy the games, and give them their due.  They are a celebration of  humanity and of possibilities.  But much more important in the great scheme of things, is to accept the many ways people can be a champion, to continue to search for heros in the small ways as much as in the big ways and to always count the smallest of human victories as some of the most important things we do.