The words covered in this article are extemporary, extemporaneous, extempore and extemporize, decree, exorbitant, antithesis and antithetical, mutable, immutable and mutation, incoherent, coherent, cohesion, and adhere and adhesion. Previously done words that will reoccur today are promulgation, arbitrary, whim, disseminate, commensurate, resolution, compliance and incessant.
We have already discussed in Day 20 that the need for promulgation has been recognized from the ancient times. A ‘just’ ruler has always been thought to be one who rules not by his own arbitrary will or whim but by laws that he has taken care to make well known before he starts penalizing his subjects for non-compliance. For example, the Code of Hammurabi dates back to about 1758 BC; it was a set of 282 laws written in the format of
“A person who does X will be punished by Y”
and organized by subject, and copies of it were disseminated widely across the Babylonian empire.
The English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704), commonly regarded as the father of liberalism, wrote about the importance of governance through well-established and promulgated laws, which people know are going to stand firmly now and in future, instead of rule by “extemporary Arbitrary Decrees.”
Extemporary
The adjective extemporary means unplanned; done on the spot, with little or no preparation or planning. The word can alternatively be written as extempore or extemporaneous. The verb form of the word is extemporize, which means to do with little or no preparation or planning.
Origin: Latin ex-, out of + tempus, time => ‘out of time’ => ‘not having even one moment to prepare’ => ‘on the spot.’
Decree
The word decree can be both a noun and a verb. As a noun, it means an authoritative order, and as a verb, it means to pass an authoritative order.
You have read in Day 20 of the anecdote that Caligula once started laughing out loudly at a dinner party, amused by the thought that the throats of all his dinner guests could be immediately cut with just one order of his. Such an order, if given, would be an example of an extemporary arbitrary decree. Let’s see how.
- It would be an order given by the ruling authority. So, it would be a decree.
- The emperor would give the order not after following the due process of law – someone was formally charged with an offence, his case was given a proper hearing where he had an opportunity to present his side of the story and where the charging authority gave convincing evidence for the accusations made by them, and then an impartial judge gave him a punishment commensurate with his crime – but just on the spur of the moment. There would be no forethought involved. Such an order would be extemporaneous/extemporary/extempore.
- There would be no rhyme or reason behind such a horrific execution of the guests, no logic to it at all. It would just be a case of something tickling the emperor’s fancy, his saying it, and the thing being done. So, the order would be arbitrary.
To quote John Locke,
“It cannot be supposed that [people] should intend, had they a power so to do, to give to any one, or more, an absolute arbitrary power over their persons and estates, and put a force into the magistrate’s hand to execute his unlimited will arbitrarily upon them. This were to put themselves into a worse condition than the state of nature, wherein they had a liberty to defend their right against the injuries of others and were upon equal terms of force to maintain it, whether invaded by a single man, or many in combination.
Whereas by supposing they have given up themselves to the absolute arbitrary power and will of a legislator, they have disarmed themselves, and armed him, to make a prey of them when he pleases; he being in a much worse condition, who is exposed to the arbitrary power of one man who has the command of 100,000, than he that is exposed to the arbitrary power of 100,000 single men; no body being secure, that his will, who has such a command, is better than that of other men, though his force be 100,000 times stronger.
And therefore, whatever form the commonwealth is under, the ruling power ought to govern by declared and received laws, and not by extemporary dictates and undetermined resolutions . . . [forcing mankind] to obey . . . the exorbitant and unlimited decrees of [the ruler’s] sudden thoughts or unrestrained, and till that moment unknown, wills, without having any measures set down which may guide and justify [the ruler’s] actions . . . All the power the government has, being only for the good of the society, as it ought not to be arbitrary and at pleasure, so it ought to be exercised by established and promulgated laws; that both the people may know their duty, and be safe and secure within the limits of the law; and the rulers too kept within their bounds and not be tempted by the power they have in their hands.”
John Locke in the second of his Two Treatises of Government (1689)
Exorbitant
The adjective exorbitant means excessive, much greater than what would be considered a normal or reasonable amount or extent.
Origin: Latin ex-, out of + orbita, path => ‘out of orbit.’
If housing prices are said to have become exorbitant in an area, this means that they are much greater than they should be when the paying capacity of the people who live in an area like that is taken into account.
In the above quote, the phrase “exorbitant and unlimited decrees” can be read to mean ‘unreasonable and unlimited decrees,’ that is, orders that are much harsher than would be considered reasonable and for which there is no upper limit to how much still harsher they could have been or to what domains of an individual’s life they could apply.
For example, if, suddenly taking offence to a dinner guest, Caligula had him immediately put in jail for a night, even that would have been an example of an exorbitant and extemporary arbitrary decree by our modern standards, but to not stop at this relatively mild expression of displeasure and have this man immediately beheaded is surely quite excessive. However, who could have stopped the emperor if, still not satisfied, he had ordered soldiers to march at once into the home of this person and murder his parents, wife, and children, and declared that this man’s property was henceforth transferred to the emperor’s name? His word was law; what he said would be done. So, mindful of this worst-case scenario that very much could have been, if the dinner guest was only imprisoned for one night, he would probably have thanked his stars that he got away relatively unharmed, and if he was beheaded, his family would probably have felt grateful to God that the emperor did not think of extending his cruelty to the man’s family.
The Roman people under Caligula’s rule were indeed subjected, as John Locke puts it, to their ruler’s “sudden thoughts or unrestrained, and till that moment unknown, [will].”
During the first six months of his rule, Caligula had shown great generosity to the Roman public, with the hope that they would regard him as an improvement over the previous emperor. He granted bonuses to the city troops and army, organized lavish games for public entertainment, in which he also gave out liberal prizes to common people, provided financial aid to those who lost property in fires, and abolished some taxes. He also started many expensive construction projects, some as public property and others for his personal use.
Such unrestrained spending soon exhausted the state’s treasury. Caligula’s quick fix then was to levy taxes on lawsuits, weddings and prostitution, with immediate effect. Because promulgation of new rules had been an established practice in Rome for centuries, Caligula too followed the letter, if not the spirit, of this obligation; he hung copies of the new tax code, written in tiny letters, at the very top of high pillars in public places. So, if any citizen showed reluctance in paying the increased tax bill, expressing ignorance of the new law, the tax collectors could simply shrug and say, “Not my problem if you were too lazy to climb up the pillar to stay up to date on the laws that govern you. The choice is yours – pay the tax quietly or face the severe punishment specified in the new laws for non-compliant individuals.”
At times, Caligula would quietly “promulgate” in this manner a law targeted at just one individual, who would have no idea that this trap had been set against him and would go on conducting his business as usual and suddenly get arrested, and sometimes even killed, and his estate confiscated as fine for violating the new law.
It was in Caligula’s interests that the general public should not know new laws – the more were the legal violations, the greater would be the fine collection. His way of ruling was the very antithesis of the rule of law.
Antithesis
The noun antithesis means exact opposite. The adjective form of the word is antithetical. If A is antithetical to B, this means that A is the exact opposite of B.
Origin: Latin anti-, against, opposite to + tithenai, to place => ‘that which is placed directly opposite to.’
Compare Caligula’s ever-changing rulebook with Hammurabi’s code which was set in stone and so remained the same for a long, long time. For the citizens to have a chance of knowing the law well, it should be sufficiently constant.
As James Madison, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America and its fourth President, wrote:
“The internal effects of a mutable policy are . . . calamitous. . . It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they. . . undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?”
James Madison, in The Federalist Papers (No. 62)
Mutable
The adjective mutable means:
- Changeable
- Highly likely to change, inconstant
The opposite of this is immutable, meaning permanent, changeless.
Origin: Latin mūtāre, to change.
The word mutation also comes from this root and means change. A genetic mutation is a change in the genetic material of an organism.
Incoherent
The adjective incoherent is used for something that is so lacking in clarity or order that its different parts seem to have no logical connection with one another.
Its opposite is the adjective coherent, which is used for something whose different parts are logically connected or stick together.
Origin: Latin co-, together + haerere, to cling => ‘the things that cling together’
The verb cohere means to stick together, and its noun form is cohesion.
The other word from the root haerere is adhere.
Adhere
The verb adhere means to cling to. Its noun forms are adhesion, the condition of two things clinging to one another, and adhesive, a substance such as a glue or cement that makes two things stick to one another. An adhesive bandage is one that sticks to the body.
Origin: Latin ad-, to + haerere, to cling.
That’s it for today. See you tomorrow, but before you go, here are a few more usage examples of the words you’ve learnt today.
- The Nobel laureate writer was attending her granddaughter’s graduation ceremony along with her family. One of the professors recognized her and requested her to speak to the gathering. She tried to refuse as she had nothing prepared but upon his insistence, she agreed. Her short extempore speech about some of the life lessons she had learnt since her own graduation from a university was very well-received by her audience.
- Shih Huang Ti, the first Emperor of China and the man who built the Great Wall, decreed that every book written before he was born should be destroyed.
- The students of a GRE coaching institute in a small town clashed with the security and the staff of the institute alleging that it had collected exorbitant fees from them but had failed to prepare them well for the test.
- The man whom other men of the fort called “Beauty” was an antithesis of the name. He was pre-eminently unbeautiful.
- “One of the great tragedies of life is that men seldom bridge the gulf between practice and profession, between doing and saying. . . On the one hand, we proudly profess certain sublime and noble principles, but on the other hand, we sadly practise the very antithesis of these principles. . . This strange dichotomy, this agonising gulf between the ought and the is, represents the tragic theme of man’s earthly pilgrimage.” Martin Luther King Jr., Strength to Love
- During his delirium, Bulan’s ravings were, for the most part, quite incoherent, but there was one name that he repeated many times–a woman’s name, preceded by a number, `Nine ninety nine Priscilla.’
- In movies, characters are shown to have the superhuman ability to extemporize songs – they seem to create songs with deep meaning and complex rhyme patterns on the fly, just like that, with perfect ease – whereas in real life, most of us have to scratch our heads for hours to rhyme our second line with the first.
- “Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social, and the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both.” Martin Luther King Jr.
- The university adhered to its admission policy and refused to give in to the students’ demands to change it.
- Hate speeches made by political leaders against people of other religions damage social cohesion.
- An ordinary teenager Peter Parker became the Spiderman due to a genetic mutation, caused by the bite of a radioactive spider, which created many spider-like qualities in him, such as making webs, clinging to walls and being hyperalert to danger.
- “Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable.” Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz
- The various reasons that he gave for not accepting the job did not cohere. Another way of saying the same thing: His explanation for not accepting the job was incoherent.
- “No matter how innocent a slave might be–it availed him nothing, when accused by Mr. Gore of any misdemeanor. To be accused was to be convicted, and to be convicted was to be punished; the one always following the other with immutable certainty.” Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave