Lib

LIB is a strange and powerful word. To be labelled as such today is, for many, taken as a serious insult; excised from its party-political foundations, a Lib has simply come to mean a hypocrite, someone notionally–although not exclusively–left-leaning and quick-tempered or, perhaps, easily ‘triggered’. In common parlance, the ‘libs’ sit within a menagerie of terminally online political personas, alongside ‘snowflakes’, the ‘wokerati’, ‘cuckservatives’ and more. To “own the libs” as Republican politicians are wont to do, is to exploit this disposition, to humiliate their perceived opposition (and in the process, often, themselves). However, the word lib has a much richer past than its contemporary use would suggest.

Reconstructing lib’s journey through the Proto-Indo European (PIE) and Proto-Germanic languages one finds two key threads. The first comes from the PIE term *lewb, a verb which itself has two seemingly contradictory senses, meaning both to covet and desire (later contributing to the words ‘libido’ and ‘love’) as well as to cleave or cut off(giving ‘leave’ or ‘left’ today). From this latter sense of *lewb as a kind of damage is formed the Proto-Germanic lubją meaning, on the one hand, ‘wort’ or ‘herb’ and on the other ‘potion’ or ‘poison’. (Interestingly, in many languages, these two senses – of desire and damage – seem to combine in the concept of a love potion.) The second–and perhaps more straightforward–strand derives from the PIE word *h₁lewdʰ which denotes ‘people’ or perhaps, more specifically, ‘free men’. It is from this latter *h₁lewdʰ, for example, that the term louðeros is derived in Proto-Italic (meaning simply ‘free’) as well as libertus in Latin, later giving ‘liberty’ in various forms throughout the European dialects.

When this complex knot of senses enters the English language it does so, as one might expect, in many different ways and at many historical moments. The first is in the Old English lybb, which takes up the Proto-Germanic *lubją as a noun used to denote drugs or medicine, as well as poison and charms. As is typical in Old English, ‘lybb’ formed the basis for a number of compound terms such as ‘lyb-cræft’ (witch-craft) and lyblace (black magic). For example, in Richard Morris’ Blickling Homilies of the Tenth Century, one may read:

Hió him sealdon áttor drincan ðæt mid myclen lybcræfte wæs geblanden [They gave him a poison drink that was mixed with great skill]

Or, in the opening line of the Æcerbot – a well-known Anglo-Saxon (C11th) metrical charm which sought to remedy poorly yielding fields – one might learn:

Her ys seo bot, hu ðu meaht þine æceras betan gif hi nellaþ wel wexan oþþe þær hwilc ungedefe þing on gedon bið on dry oððe on lyblace. [Here is the remedy, how you may better your land, if it will not grow well, or if some harmful thing has been done to it by a sorcerer or by a poisoner.]

Here, as philologist Dr Ciaran Arthur notes, the term ‘lyblace’ denotes a source of evil in the earth, indicating that the Aecerbot itself is a kind of ‘counter-charm’, recruiting a superior power against the evil in the land – expelling it “through words of divine power…” (Such a sense is retained in the contemporary term ‘libation’). And yet more senses of the term ‘lybb’ or ‘lib’ emerge in Old English, in one configuration – no less mystic – referring to the concept of ‘life’ itself. This sense of lib as life is expressed in another passage of the C10th Blicking Homilies, in which:

Æðelwald..hæfde ealle þa geatu forworht in to him & sæde þæt he wolde oðer oððe þær libban oððe þær licgan. [Æðelwald...had all the gates closed to him and said that he would either live there or lie there.]

Strangely, one can identify a connection in this sense through the Proto-Germanic *lubją (and, by extension, PIE *lewb) once again, as to ‘live’ or ‘continue living’ was viewed – much more so at the time, perhaps – as having been ‘left behind’. In any case, libban (to live) – alongside lybb – formed a crucial part of the Old and Middle English vocabularies, and was in use as late as the C13th. For example, in the Middle English dialogue Vices and Virtues, compiled in c.1200:

'Becweð þine cwide,' he sade, 'for ðan þu scalt bien dead, and naht ne scalt tu libben.' Ðe king warð sari, alswa richeise is lad to laten, and swiðe lef to libben. [Speak your words,' he said, 'for you shall be dead, and nothing shall you live.' The king became sorrowful, just as riches are slow to acquire and very dear to live by.]

However, it was not long after the Norman invasion of 1066 that these terms, and perhaps the concepts with which they were associated, fell out of use. With William the Conqueror came lib’s second thread, from *h₁lewdʰ –which had been on it’s own journey through Latin and French – arriving, finally, in English, in the form of liberty (of all things)!

According to the OED, the earliest example of liberty’s use in print can be found in Wycliffite’s 1384 translation of the Bible – for example, in Corinthians:

Forsoth where is the spirit of God, there is liberte.

Here, liberty means something quite specific – opposed to contemporary uses – and should be understood, most accurately, as a theological term articulating freedom ‘from the bondage or dominating influence of sin’. Liberty, in this original sense, is a specifically Christian freedom, as articulated in minister Samuel Hieron’s 1604 manuscript The Preachers Plea:

This libertie, which Christians haue, is a spirituall libertie, a heauenly liberty, a liberty of the soule..which setteth the soule at liberty from destruction.

While this theological conception of liberty continues to be used today, at the start of the C15th more secular senses were beginning to develop. In 1484, for example, William Caxton – in his translation of Subtyl Historyes & Fables of Esope – writes of an almost prototypical form of civil liberty:

And he sayd to them the kynge whiche ye haue demaunded shalle be your mayster For whan men haue that which men oughte to haue they ought to be ioyeful and glad And he that hath lyberte ought to kepe hit wel For nothyng is better than lyberte For lyberte shold not be wel sold for alle the gold and syluer of all the world

The word liberal emerged throughout this period as well – much as in today’s use, as an adjective describing someone generous or ‘free in giving’ – and took on the secular undercurrents already at work in liberty. In Shakespeare’s 1600 play The Merchant of Venice, for example, a conniving Portia opines:

I see, sir, you are liberal in offers. You taught me first to beg, and now methinks. You teach me how a beggar should be answered.

Over the course of the C17th ‘liberal’ morphed from adjective to noun a number of times, first as a denoting a generous or bountiful person, as in John Locke’s Thoughts concerning Education:

Let them find by experience, that the most liberal has always most plenty.

And later – in a somewhat contradictory sense – through criminals' slang, as a prominent member of a criminal gang (as evidenced in William Melvin’s translation of Sonne of Rogue):

Over all these a kinde of Theeves bearesway, called among us Liberalls,..

And then, as the French Revolution of the late C18th commenced, both liberty, liberal, liberation and a whole host of associated terms took on newfound, explicitly political meanings. Here the concept of a Liberal which we hold today took form, first seen in print around 1814 (as in a report for the Leeds Mercury), already the subject of derision:

He has nominated a commission to try the Members of the Cortes, called in derision, the Liberals, (for liberal sentiments are a crime in his eyes) now in prison.

And at last, in C19th Britain, as the reformation of the Whigs and Radicals produced a new Liberal Party to oppose the Tories, Punch – the satirical magazine – offered up the first use of Lib (as an off-the-cuff shorthand for Liberal) in 1885:

"Tory-demmycrat" sounds nice and harmless, but if it means simply cold scran / From the Rad's broken-wittel bag, drat it! far better the Libs' Grand Old Man!

Here we see the coining of a phrase which will come, undoubtedly, to condition much of the – increasingly polarised – debates held over this year of anglophone elections. However, as we head into them, it is important to remember, as with *lewb, lybb and the Æcerbot, the magical, and indeed poisonous, properties of language.

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This article was written for a monthly column – The Remainder – in the Sticky Fingers monthly mailout