Innocent

“We were so innocent then.”

I don’t always feel the need to look up the etymology of a word. I have always loved learning about etymologies, and as a child paged through my local library’s OED for fun. There’s a reason, though, that opening an essay or speech with the etymology of a word you plan to discuss is a cliché. It’s a simplistic way to find meaning, a sort of parlor trick. How Chaucer used a word doesn’t generally say a whole lot about how we use it now. It’s just one of those, as Arsenio Hall called them, “things that make you go ‘huh.’”

The word “innocent,” though, has such ancient rings to it, so many echoes of the past, that this morning I needed to look it up in Meriam-Webster to find its roots. When I was growing up, I knew families who kept dictionaries on stands in the corner of their living rooms specifically for this purpose. I picked up my phone from my nightstand. Dictionary stands are from a more innocent time, if you will, when the proper use of words could be thought to hold still long enough to be placed on a pedestal.

That is how we tend to use “innocent” now, outside of the law, as a synonym for unknowing, unsophisticated, purer, guileless. Who could have seen what was coming? We were so innocent then.

This likely comes from the story of Eden and the tree of knowledge. Eating the fruit, gaining knowledge, was the end of Adam and Eve’s innocence. It was their first sin.

Which is why we get wistful about innocence. We connect it with our own Edens, the lost places or times before we saw terrible things happen and learned how painful the world could be.

The word “innocence,” it turns out, doesn’t have roots in knowledge, as it turns out. It goes way back to the Indo-European “noḱ-éi̯e-” meaning destroy, which lead to the Latin “noxius,” meaning harmful, injurious, and then modified with “in” to mean without. Not destructive. Not harmful. Not injurious. The notion of intent comes in later, particularly in legal terms, knowledge about what you’re doing and how it could harm someone or something.

When we remember our personal Edens, we remember the peacefulness of not knowing things were terrible. The reality is that all sorts of terrible things were happening, we just didn’t know they were happening. We probably even did terrible things without knowing they were terrible.

One of my loss of Eden moments as a child was in some day care center. I had spent some time constructing a tower out of blocks. I liked playing by myself and I remember feeling peaceful and calm as I figured out how to balance each piece.

Out of nowhere, some boy came racing over and kicked my tower over, then just went on with his day. A destroyer laying waste to my happy work. My innocence was shattered. I didn’t know before then that there were people who would destroy things for fun. Here I am some fifty years later still feeling echoes of the shock when I remember it.

Now, though, I understand that the boy was innocent, too. At least in the later sense of not knowing. Did he know that I’d be still thinking about what he’d done decades later? That he’d shaken me to my core?

Maybe he did. Maybe he wanted to hurt me when he did it. I think that he laughed. Was he laughing at my pain or at the exciting clatter of the blocks flying everywhere?

At the time, I thought it was my pain that made him happy, but now I know the joy of kicking things over, overturning apple carts.

I ate from the Tree of Knowledge that day. His kick was unwanted forbidden fruit. He pushed me out of my garden, out of my peaceful calm. He was the destroyer and transformer. I was the innocent destroyed and transformed.