advent
Advent considers, amongst other things, how significant encounters begin - how they arrive, and arise, in the first place, and what we can, and can’t yet see, but might intuit, in those early formative moments. This sense of advent, meaning ‘an important arrival’, is only from 1742, an extended sense of its late Old English meaning as the spiritual season preceding Christmas, which anticipated the arrival of Christ. Digging deeper we can find a kernel in Latin adventus - a coming, approach, or arrival, in Church Latin understood as ‘the coming of the Saviour’, from the past participle of advenire – to arrive at, come to, from ad ‘to’ + venire ‘to come’. In these winding etymologies language itself is arriving, coming into its contemporary meanings, in each age, from a deeper root, in this case from an Indo-European root gwa meaning to go, or come. And is this even the beginning? It’s hard to know. Looking forward, or back, all we have is a glimpse. A small aperture.
But following the same path back up from these ancient beginnings we can take a different turn at Latin advenire (arrive at, come to, reach) to adventurus, its future participle, which in its feminine form is adventura (res) – ‘(a thing) about to happen’. From here we can journey into the world of Old French to find aventure in the 11th century, now meaning ‘chance, accident, occurrence, event, happening’, and arrive by about 1200 at aventure, auenture – ‘that which happens by chance, fortune, luck’, a philosophical twist of fate which changes everything. But nothing in language stands still. The word continues to accumulate drama through the next three centuries, from ‘risk, danger’, in the sense of a trial of one's chances (c. 1300), and ‘a perilous undertaking’ (late 14c.) to ‘a novel or exciting incident, a remarkable occurrence in one's life’ by the 1560s. In other variations it also acquired some medieval magic, coming to mean ‘a wonder, a miracle; accounts of marvellous things’ in the 13th century, and its -d- was restored in English during the 15th and 16th centuries. Why? I don’t know, except that the Renaissance imagination was endlessly reinventing itself, so why not? – even the word venture appears as a 15th century variant.
In another display of linguistic flexibility, the adjective adventuresome - bold and daring - makes its first appearance in 1731, itself a bold hybrid of a Latinate word with an Old Germanic add-on -some, from Old English -sum, which intensifies, indicating a heightened degree of the quality named. So that’s basically adventure with A LOT of adventurous spirit.
Which is a very circuitous way of saying that I like the way the advent of something could conjure in the word itself a coming adventure, and its spirit too. So, may our new year be full of the best of adventures, ventures bold and daring - in short, wonders, miracles and accounts of marvellous things.