austraLasia 931
Youth Meet: a moot point. Would it do
for 'Confronto'?
ROME: 30th October '04 --
>From time to time we see it in a headline: India will host Youth Meet,
an excellent example from The Times of India (Indiatimes). The story
in itself is interesting: Bangalore, December 7th-9th next, World Youth Peace
Summit, not Salesian inspired nor the point of this article; meet as a
noun, is!
English is a widely-owned language, and
therefore has almost unlimited flexibility - almost. Salesians across six
continents employ English as a first language, a second and
regular tongue for carrying out the mission, an occasional third - English
is hard to avoid, globally - or a fair-to-middling fourth, to keep in touch
with old friends.
Should we be surprised, then, to find
meet, the noun, in our regular Salesian employ? No, but not for
the reason one might deduce from the previous paragraph. Is it a
back-formation then, formed from the more usual meeting, a neologism
from the USA, where it is commonly found in sports headlines such as
Track Meet in Columbus, or is it plain confusion between verb and
noun?
None of the above I would suggest.
Meet is an old word resuscitated, or which has
never died out, rather, since its regular use in the 13th century. It
was in common use for the gathering of people at a fox hunt until very
recently - now banned, glory be to God! It was a short shift from
there to any sports gathering, hence its common use to describe track
and field events.
Less known would be its connection with
moot. Nowadays moot is mainly an adjective, a moot
point, but still, in parts of England a noun, a meeting
hall, while the legal fraternity know it for what older Salesians termed a
'casus', a weekly hypothetical moral case argued as an exercise. A
Moot, however, did not become a meet through the great
English vowel shift - we would have expected maut from that, after all
a mouse, pronounced [moos] still by the Scots who are unlikely to
make any shift towards anything English, is a mouse,
pronounced [maus], for the rest of us. Moot became
meet by taking a trip through Middle Dutch and German
first.
As for meeting, which British
English would much prefer to meet, it is as old as Beowulf, the
oldest surviving epic in British literature (10th century or before), where a
gemeting was equivalent to a convention or council, and several
centuries older than moot or meet. As a personal
preference I'd give age the right-of-way in this case, but can we deny
youth its place in history? If they want to meet, let them have their
meet. In an older liturgical phrase we would say it is meet
and just!
In fact, since we are hard put to find a
suitable English equivalent for Confronto (as in Confronto
2004, the gathering of young people from all over Europe at Colle Don
Bosco), perhaps Meet is the way to go.
________________________________
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