The Meaning of Lore
1st July 2024
English- speakers now tend to associate words drawn from Germanic roots with the ordinary and everyday, not the theoretical and academic, however technical their original usage might have been. Trying to use them as scientific vocabulary sounds folksy and quaint, so earthlore was never likely to catch on. Perhaps the most familiar form of lore, folklore, was coined in 1846 deliberately to evoke these associations: the word’s inventor wanted what he called a ‘good Saxon compound’ to describe the oral traditions of ‘the People’. Ironically, that’s not what lore would have implied to an Anglo-Saxon at all. The lore/ology distinction follows this well-established pattern: lore suggests oral, not written; anecdotal, not source-based; intuitive, not scientific. Where two bodies of knowledge about the same topic co-exist, the distinction can be a useful one. Think for instance of the difference between meteorology and weather-lore, the scientific study of weather versus knowledge about the subject gathered through experience and passed down through tradition. Information in the category of weather-lore might not meet scientific standards for verifiability, but may still have a cultural value that makes it worth transmitting.