Mind your language
RICHARD HOUGH, who has recently published a biography of Captain Cook, wrote to me the other day about the word Borettoes which occurs in his book. I had suggested it was a mistake for Bonettoes or Bonittoes, a name for the tunny. Mr Hough points out that Boret- toes is how it appears in the Public Record Office transcript. So if it is a mistake, it is not Mr Hough's.
Anyway, I was thinking about Mr Hough even before his letter arrived. He had picked out in his book a letter from Admiral Lord Colville to the Admiralty which says: 'From my experi- ence of Mr Cook's genius and capacity, I think him well qualified for the work he has performed and for greater undertakings of the same kind.' Mr Hough uses 'Mr Cook's genius and capacity' as a chapter heading. I think we have caught genius here in a very interesting stage of its develop- ment. Clearly it doesn't mean what we mean when we call Shakespeare or Ein- stein a genius.
In Latin genius meant primarily a tutelary deity, and by extension the spir- it of a person or nation. In English it came to mean, among other things, 'a characteristic disposition or turn of mind'. This is obsolete, but wasn't in 1762 when Colville was writing. From this sense it developed the meaning 'nat- ural ability or capacity', and it may be that Colville, in using 'genius and capaci- ty', is using a synonymous doublet. In its history, genius has been influ- enced by the Latin ingenium, whence our ingenious (or ingeniose as Aubrey had it) and, indeed, engine.
Dr Johnson's dictionary doesn't men- tion the most common (the Einstein) meaning today. Perhaps if we could ask Colville he wouldn't know quite if he had meant 'disposition' or 'capacity'. But later in Mr Hough's book a mid- shipman, James Trevenen, refers to Cook's 'sublime and soaring genius', which is probably the 'disposition' meaning, with connotations of 'tutelary deity'. And Lieutenant James King wrote of Cook as 'our good genius', which is a meaning Cicero would have understood.
Dot Wordsworth
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