Lexicon 002 alethea

Growing up in the church life, you can’t help but note certain names as “church kid names.” Lately though, I see parents veering away from Jacobs and Timothys, Zoes and Graces. Instead there are baby Acacias, baby Vines, and baby Olivias. Quaint, aren’t they? Tasteful, too. 

    Then you get highbrow ones like Baby Aletheas. Not staking a claim on nominative determinism. But growing up thinking your name means “truthfulness” and thinking your name is associated with a ditzy blonde British girl, who talks to flowers and eats hallucinogenic fungus, are two different things. 

    Even though aletheia came to signify “truth, truthfulness”, the literal translation is this: not concealing. It is composed of the prefix a- “not” + lēthē "forgetfulness, oblivion, concealment”. 

    So is it just me, or is it curious that the Ancient Greeks, when racking their brains for a word to mean “truth”, decided, nah, we should just use a negative prefix to invert the meaning of “concealment” and use that to denote “truth”?

    I find it so. Because it sounds like the Ancient Greeks were vibing with Jean Baudrillard centuries before the term “hyperreality” was coined: there is no such thing as truth; and if there is, it can only be said, it is that which lies beyond the veil.

    So next time when I see another baby Alethea crawling between the chairs, gnawing at her own knuckles, I’ll try my best to not whisper into her ear: 

Did you know, your name means “truthfulness” in Greek? And it is coincidentally the origin of Alice, which is a name that people associate with mad tea parties and bloody roses? And just in case you didn’t get the intensely philosophical connection between madness and reality in your name, “aletheia” has the literal translation of “not concealing” which opens endless questions about what is being hidden and who is doing the dastardly deceptive hiding! 

    I’ll try not to do that because, let’s face it, the parents probably just liked the sound.