This is another of those words that are kind of words, being in the dictionary, but also kind of not, since they’re not actually used or understood by anyone (except the very occasional person who decides to deploy them). I’m reading a very interesting book about Bakhtin that has the admirable quality of providing all quotes in the original in footnotes, so the reader who possesses Russian can see what the man actually wrote (I’ll be posting about the book when I finish it), and at one point he’s quoted as saying “hagiography, just like icon painting, avoids any transgredient moments which delimit a human being and render him overly concrete, because they invariably diminish authoritativeness.” I blinked several times on seeing the collection of letters “transgredient” and wondered what the hell Bakhtin’s word was. Thanks to the admirable quality noted above, I just turned to the Russian and found “агиография, как и иконопись, избегает ограничивающей и излишне конкретизующей трансгредиентности, ибо эти моменты всегда понижают авторитетность” (it’s from this text). So OK, there was apparently a word трансгредиентность… except that the only person who’s ever used it appears to be Bakhtin, so how the hell did he expect any readers to understand it?
Well, what about English? It turns out, to my surprise, that the OED has an entry transgredient (“First published 1914; not fully revised”); it’s labeled “rare” and has two senses:
1. Violating a law or obligation.
1837 To paint the other branches of the Church as such slippery transgredient mortals.
S. Smith, Works (1850) 6082. Passing beyond subjective limits; objective.
1904 Pragmatism..guarantees no objective or social certainty. Its standards are lacking in the essential character of a standard—transgredient reference and verifiability.
Journal of Philosophy, Psychology & Scientific Methods vol. 1 426
Is the second sense what Bakhtin meant? Who knows? What’s odd is that he usually wrote in reasonably clear Russian, sometimes distorted by his translators into indigestible mouthfuls (see my complaints here); if he used разноречие instead of *гетероглоссия for the concept annoyingly translated as “heteroglossia,” why didn’t he find a more transparent way to express what he wanted to say here? Well, it was an early work, and maybe he was still under the spell of Kant…
Presumably from transgrediens, present participle of transgredior. The past participle is the etymon of the much-more-common-in-English “transgression” and related words.
Yes, but that doesn’t help much.
It sounds like even in Latin it had a variety of senses with different valences, since “walk over” can quite easily mean something positive like “exceed expectations” or something negative like “break the rules” or “desert to the enemy.”
But in any event I was sufficiently taken by the OED’s quote from Sydney Smith that I used the google books corpus to locate the entire sentence: “The Church Commissioners should not have suffered their reports and recommendations to paint the other branches of the Church as such slippery transgredient mortals, and to leave the world to imagine that Bishops may be safely trusted to their own goodness without enactment or controul.” This from the first of Smith’s three “Letter(s) to Archdeacon Singleton on the Church Commission,” described by wikipedia (probably by some source that has been cut-and-pasted from …) as being “as bright and trenchant as his best contributions to the Edinburgh Review.” The addressee looks to be the fellow called Thomas Singleton (priest) for wikipedia disambiguation purposes.
That’s great; thanks for digging it up!
Per Todorov, it’s complementary to ingredient and borrowed from Jonas Cohn.
Boy, did Bakhtin ran with this word. Jonas Cohn explains his coinage thus: “Den Ausdruck „transgredient” bevorzuge ich vor dem naheliegenden „transcendent”, weil die erkenntnistheoretische Verwendung dieses Wortes zu Missverständnissen führen könnte.” [I prefer the term “transgredient” to the obvious “transcendent” because the epistemological use of this word could lead to misunderstandings.] It’s hard to argue with that. Where there is no understanding there hardly can be any mis-understanding.
Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae 1254.001.NA.AulGel.10.26.pr.5
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Idcirco uerbum ‘transgredi’ conuenire non putauit neque uolantibus neque serpentibus neque nauigantibus, sed his solis, qui gradiuntur et pedibus iter emetiuntur.
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Citing Pollio, Gellius argues forcefully that no serious author uses transgredi for crossings other than by foot, i.e., in the above, crossings by flying, floating or slithering objects are excluded.
“transgredient” is in the Duden, marked as a philosophy term and defined as “überschreitend, über etwas hinausgehend”, so close to the OED sense. I can’t find any evidence that anyone other than Cohn ever used it however.
In English the word also apparently has a pleasant medical meaning as well: ” spreading outside the usual area; said of skin lesions that begin on the palms or soles and spread to the back of the hand or foot.”
Per Todorov, it’s complementary to ingredient and borrowed from Jonas Cohn.
Thanks very much, that’s exactly what I needed! Not that I now “understand” the word, but I get as much out of it as I do out of most philosophical verbiage. Here’s Todorov’s explanation:
And of course D.O. is completely correct about no understanding = no misunderstanding.
(“Ästhetik”.)
Fixed, thanks.
That “transgressive” sense may be useful. For instance, if you’re opposed to the use of gelatin in a mousse, you can say it’s an expedient but transgredient ingredient.
Cohen or Cohn? At first I wondered if it was a transliteration problem, but Todorov’s book is translated from French, so that’s not it. As best I can tell from a little googling, Jonas Cohn is normally spelled “Cohn” in French and English just as in German, but Todorov wrote “Jonas Cohen” in the initial publication of this chapter in a journal, and that was copied into the book, then by the English translator, and then by a bunch of other people who apparently copied it from Todorov, without correcting it as MMcM did.
That quotation from Sydney Smith is the only appearance of “transgredient” in English before the 20th century, as far as Google Books knows. (A mention of “transgredient variation” in a genetics paper is misdated by Google to 1899; it’s really 1949.)
Wikipedia reminds me that Sydney Smith is also known for a “rhyming recipe for salad dressing” — is that the one with “Let onion atoms lurk within the bowl, And, half-suspected, animate the whole”? Yes, it is, and naturally Language Hat has discussed it!
“Transgredient” seems to have enjoyed a vogue in philosophy and psychology following Cohn, with dozens of GB-hits in the 1901-1910 range in English, German, and French. The Century Dictionary included it in the 1909 Supplement, defined as “Passing across or beyond; objective. [Rare.]”, and illustrated with the same journal quotation that the OED uses — the OED may have pinched it from them.
Huh. So Bakhtin wasn’t being obscurantist, he was just catching a wave that quickly and definitively subsided.