Book Titles

In our continuing series of posts about where titles of books and other works originated, we add these book titles.

The novel about colonialism in Africa,Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, takes its title from a W.B. Yeats’s poem, “The Second Coming.” to name his story about colonialism, pride, and loss:

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...”

Flannery O’Connor's short story collection, Everything That Rises Must Converge  borrows from the book Omega Point by the French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

“Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge.”


Evelyn Waugh turned to T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Wasteland” for his book A Handful of Dust.

“I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”

John Steinbeck often turned to the Bible for titles. His Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath  sounds like it might be Biblical. After several other working titles, his wife suggested a phrase from the song “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” by Julia Ward Howe.

“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.”

Evian

This post is about what is NOT the origin of a name.

Evian water (French pronunciation ​evjɑ̃) is a brand of mineral water. Many people have noticed that the name is naive spelled backwards. The idea that comes along with that reversal is that this fancy bottled water and that the joke is on those naive consumers willing to pay a premium price for water.

But that is not true.

Evian is owned by Danone, a French multinational corporation that sells the mineral water and also a line of organic skin care products and a luxury resort in France under that name.

The origin goes back to 1789 when the Marquis of Lessert drank some water from the Sainte Catherine spring on the land of a M. Cachat. The marquis had been suffering from kidney and liver problems, but claimed that the water cured his ailments.

Still sold in glass bottles too

In 1859, it became a business, and in 1878 the French Ministry of Health actually authorized the bottling of "Cachat water" because of a recommendation by the Medicine Academy.

The water sold as Evian comes from several sources near Évian-les-Bains, on the south shore of Lake Geneva and was first sold in glass bottles in 1878.

In 1969, it started to be sold in plastic (PVC) bottles and it was introduced in 1978 to the U.S. market. In 1995, Evian switched to collapsible PET bottles, though it is still available in glass bottles too.

gist

GIST is an odd little word that I have heard used my entire life and never known the origin. People say "What was the gist of it?" meaning what was the essence or essential part of a matter In law, it has a more specific meaning, the real point of an action, as in "damages are the gist of the lawsuit."

The word appeared in the early 18th century and comes from Old French, gesir  "to lie" and earlier from Latin jacere.  The legal connection seems important as there was (is?) an old legal phrase cest action gist  that was used in France and England meaning "this action lies." That phrase denoted that there were sufficient grounds to proceed. "Lie" here means more like the way we use it today when we say "The difficulty lies in getting sufficient funds."

I came to all of this when I was writing about memory. There is a kind of false memory that is sometimes called "gist memory." Gist traces are fuzzy representations of a past event when we have the general idea but not the specifics of the event clear. Verbatim traces are detailed representations of a past event. It seems that although people are capable of processing both verbatim and gist information, they oddly prefer to reason with gist traces rather than verbatim.

The older I get, the more I seem to be relying on gist memories  if I remember something at all!