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WEALTH
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Pennsylvania, my home state, is officially called a commonwealth, which name contains our Word of the Week, wealth. Three other states have the same designation: Virginia, Massachusetts, and Kentucky. And you’ll hear people using the word, too, not in ordinary conversation, perhaps, but on the radio, or in a political speech, or something of that sort. I don’t know that it makes much difference now, but “state,” to the American ear, suggests what “province” suggests to the Canadian ear, a strictly subordinate thing, “only” a state. But you wouldn’t say that a commonwealth is “only” a commonwealth. It appears to imply nothing beyond itself: it has a wealth that is common to all, a well-being, a condition of having things that everyone shares in well done, as if you couldn’t really enjoy true wealth or wellness one by one, like Mr. Cyclops in his solitary cave. The Greeks, you may know, regarded the Big One-Eyed as an idiot, meaning somebody wrapped up in his own affairs, and that’s how the island of the Cyclops is, where “every family ignores its neighbors.”
“Early to bed and early to rise,” said that go-getter Benjamin Franklin, “makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” I suppose so, if you mean that he’s more likely to get a lot of fresh air, to do more work in the daylight hours, and to be out with productive people rather than to be slouching at a bar, watching a ball game he pretends to be interested in, while complaining to anybody in earshot about how unfair life is. Let’s concede the health of the body. I don’t know about how the hours you keep, of themselves, make you wise. I’d have thought instead that good work, good reading, good conversation, and the difficult habits of virtue, including piety, would set you on the road toward wisdom. But let’s set that one aside, too. Does it make you wealthy?
Now, Mr. Cyclops is a wealthy sort of monster. He has a big flock, he gets a lot of milk and wool from them, and he has no expenses. If being wealthy means you’re far in the black, Mr. Cyclops is wealthy. But really, isn’t it a paltry and slovenly life he leads, for all his selfish work? Look how he treats Odysseus and the other men who pay him a visit — and what atrocious table manners, too! Meanwhile, as Odysseus tells us, the island is full of wild grapes left untended, and rich soil which Mr. Cyclops and his fellows do not farm. It is a hand-to-mouth wealth: big hand to big mouth. Is that what we mean by wealth?
Hardly. But then we may take a look at what’s going on now in Ithaca while Odysseus is away. A horde of suitors for his wife Penelope — 108, to be precise, with their servants — has infested his manor, and they, with all the good taste in the world, with song and games and a lot of food and drink, are devouring his estate. They have ignored the warning of one of the old men of Ithaca, a prophet; even threatened to shut his mouth up for good if he keeps criticizing them. They can no longer bully Odysseus’ son Telemachus, so they lay an ambush against him, hoping to murder him on the sly. They have no care for the law of the gods. They dress well, they have two eyes instead of one, they’re young and good-looking, their fathers are mostly rich men — are they really wealthy? Is Odysseus’ estate a commonwealth for them?
I don’t think so. I think the poet Homer wants us to compare the suitors with the Cyclops, and to see beyond the curly hair and the lute-playing and the tanned physiques. They are wastrels, and as such they can form no genuine society with one another. They do not do things well.
That adverb well gets to the heart of our word wealth. It is related to our word will, meaning desire, getting things as you will them to be: one of its many cousins is Latin velle, to will, whose derivatives give us our words voluntary and volition. So then, are you wealthy if you have your will? Not necessarily, since it’s implied also that people who are sensible will what is well. You may remember the salute that Harry Bailey gives to George Bailey at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life — which isn’t going to be our Film of the Week, as it’s too early for a Christmas film: “To my big brother George, the richest man in town!” And it isn’t because George has money. It’s because George has friends, and he has friends because he has done things well, for the well-being of the whole town of Bedford Falls, as a town and not as a geographical corral for a lot of individuals striving to be like the Cyclops
.So wealth, then, is the condition of being well, or, as we say, of doing well, and though it may imply, in common usage, that you aren’t begging on streetcorners, its inner meaning, its older and still perceptible sense, suggests something more than that you have a lot of cheeses hanging on the wall of your cave, or a lot of money in the bank. The -th suffix was tacked onto Middle English wele, by analogy with health; it makes an abstract noun or a verbal noun. We’ve got about twenty of them still alive: strength, width, girth, stealth, mirth, and so forth. It’s cognate with the -tus you’ll see at the end of similar nouns in Latin: virtus (manliness, the quality of being a vir), juventus (youth), senectus (old age), and so on. We used to have dampth and chillth — but the linguistic weather got better, I guess!
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