Wordwatch: Notwithstanding
The other day I was writing a short piece – can’t remember what or why –when I found myself using the word “notwithstanding”. As I typed it, I thought: is that still in current use? It’s a completely familiar word, which I have used all my life, but as in society and in language, things are changing so rapidly now that one can’t keep up. I told myself to keep a lookout for “notwithstanding”, and note its frequency.
Lo and behold, almost at once a signal, a puff of smoke, floats up from the verbal jungle to suggest I’m on an interesting trail. It appears in the latest (February 2021) issue of The Art Newspaper – where I expect exemplary literacy (and have often been disappointed, it must be said). Someone – the Editor herself, indeed – is discussing the problems that have hovered around the painting attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, Salvator Mundi, which sold for a colossal sum in 2017. She quotes a Renaissance author, and goes on to write: ‘Not with-standing this contemporary observation …’
Bingo! It’s clear that the writer was not familiar with the word she has chosen to use, though it’s obviously one that lurks ready for use at the back of her mind. It has been a single word, no hyphens, since the late middle ages. Rather than recognising that this is an independent word with a signification only distantly related to the meanings of its component parts, she has turned it into a phrase, and separated the negative “not” from a verb that, it appears, she is also unfamiliar with.
To “withstand” is a well-established verb meaning to resist, or to “stand against” an enemy or an obstacle, usually, as the O.E.D. says, with success implied. It has never normally been hyphenated. There are other cases in which the preposition “with” is added as a prefix to a verb, altering its meaning slightly. “Withhold” and “withdraw” are other examples. The usage has survived from Old English.
“Notwithstanding” simply means “in spite of”. It is a transliteration of the Latin phrase non obstante and has been a single word since the fifteenth century. Another compound of the kind is “nevertheless”, which, as it happens, means much the same as “notwithstanding”. Again, it’s not advisable to try to break it down into its components.
So here we have the editor of a learned (or at least partly academic) periodical who has forgotten the meanings of two distinct but common words. This is not to accuse her of ignorance: it is simply to register how quickly knowledge passed on through many successive generations has been lost – suddenly lost – in the twenty-first century. I believe this is indicative of the more general loss of cultural continuity that we are seeing in so many aspects of life. We can deplore it, or accept it philosophically as an inevitable consequence of the speed with which new technology and new manners are operating on society as whole. My only concern is that we should not lose the richness and precision of expression that the English language has endowed us with – notwithstanding the inevitable alterations that come with the passing of time, whether we like them or not.