In 1625 John Donne said: ‘As Manna tasted to every man like that he liked best, so doe the Psalmes administer instruction, and satisfaction, to every man, in every emergency and occasion.’
I’m not sure where Donne got this idea about manna, but I wonder whether C.S. Lewis had it in mind when he wrote in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe about Turkish delight that was enchanted, so ‘anyone who had once tasted it would want more and more of it, and would even, if they were allowed, go on eating it till they killed themselves’.
Anyway, when Donne spoke of an emergency he did not mean something out of ER, but more a circumstance or juncture, indeed an occasion. He had paired the two words in his Devotions upon Emergent Occasions and Severall Steps in my Sicknes, in which we find ‘No Man is an Iland’ (as it was spelt, correctly enough, since the word does not derive, like isle, from Latin insula).
So what is the import of the recent outbreak of the word emerging? On Money Box on Radio 4, we were told of the emerging crime of stealing mobiles to commit bank fraud. Then a spokesman for the Scottish government mentioned ‘emerging issues around single-use disposable vapes’.
Generally it means ‘new’. But emerging connotes the idea of development. There are emerging variants of coronavirus; sports refer to emerging talents; there have been emerging economies for such a long time that one wonders if they’ll ever appear above the surface. They took over where developing nations (since the later 19th century) left off.
I’m not sure how much emerging expresses an assumption that things evolve, developing by some inherent tendency and emerging, just as Britain first at heaven’s command arose from out the azure main.
Investors put money into emerging markets in the expectation that they would grow. But in 2013 Morgan Stanley Capital International recategorised Greece from a developed nation to an emerging market. Perhaps it meant submerging market, but since then it has bobbed up again.
Comments