I looked it up and “uncouth” comes from old English “uncuth,” meaning unknown (itself from “cunnan,” meaning “to know or be able”). I assume that it gained its current usage by first being used in the sense of “unheard of,” like “What you’re doing is such bad manners it’s unheard of.” I’m just guessing about that, but let’s say I’m right because it makes sense. Nowadays its connotation is not quite that extreme; something uncouth is merely unrefined. It’s funny how words can kind of erode like that, sort of like mountains turn into foothills given enough time. 

I was going to try to build on that description and say something clever about the geology of language, but I figured that phrase was too easy and someone else must have come up with it first. I googled it and it turns out I was right: “The Geology of Language” is the title of an essay written by John Edmund Barss in the November 1920 issue of The Classical Journal. Barss, I learned from further googling, was a high school Latin teacher at the Hotchkiss School in Connecticut. He was also an occasional poet, but as far as I can tell not a particularly distinguished one. It’s interesting (to me) that we both thought of the same phrase to describe language, almost 100 years apart from each other, and no one else did (at least not in a way that can be easily found on Google) in all the time in between.

To be honest, the phrase actually does pop up once or twice in other publications in the intervening years, but it’s exclusively meant in an entirely different sense than what Barss and I were talking about. Though to be honest again, Barss and I are really not talking about precisely the same thing either, but we’re in the same area of meaning in a way that those other two or so incidences of the phrase are not. Barss is making the point that just as you can more fully appreciate the natural world by understanding its history, in the same way language is more exciting to “one who can read its life-history in its rocks and wrinkles.” My point was narrower and really just about how words change, but you see we’re in the same place and I guess his thoughts might have eventually sprung naturally from mine if I’d kept thinking about it.

Anyway I’m not emphasizing the similarity because I want to show off how clever I am. It’s more likely that no one has resuscitated the phrase in a century because it’s not a very good or very apt description of the function of language. I haven’t given it much thought, and I’m happy to admit that might very well be the case. I just think it’s interesting that Barss and I both had more or less the same idea a century apart and there’s no traceable path, as far as I can tell, from his thought to mine. Like we’re a couple of entangled particles with the same idea acting on us, and only us, across time. Maybe I should write something about the quantum physics of language. I don’t know much about quantum physics, but then again I don’t know much about geology either.