attention
English, from Latin · attendere · əˈtɛnʃən
Attention is the stretch. James said that what we attend to is our life. The etymology opens a history. It is not destiny.
- ad-
- toward
- tendere
- to stretch
- attendere
- to stretch toward
Morphology
Latin attendere: ad- (toward) + tendere (to stretch). The body is in the verb: a leaning, a tension, a waiting-upon. Courtly attendance is the same stretch, given to a person. The laboratory later made a resource of it.
Semantic range
Notice, care, military parade, limited cognitive resource, ethical waiting, looking.
History of the word
From waiting on a lord, to the dichotic listening of Cherry and Broadbent, from Simone Weil’s waiting (“attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity”) to an economy that harvests glances. Psychology measures a filter, a spotlight, a limited channel. Contemplative traditions train a stay. Painters know a looking that changes the looked-at. Ordinary distraction is the daily evidence that the stretch can fail. The etymology is an opening into this history, not a proof that attention “really is” a muscle.
A timeline of usage
- attendere: to stretch toward, to apply the mind, to wait upon
- attendance as service, as being present to someone
- James: my experience is what I agree to attend to
- Cocktail party problem; selective attention as a laboratory object
- An economy of capture; also a name for a practice of staying
A key source
William James
The Principles of Psychology (1890), chap. XI, “Attention.”
Associated traditions
Parallels, not equivalents. Different attempts to notice something about knowing.
Pali
manasikāra
Making-in-the-mind; a turning toward. Not a translation of attendere.
French
attention
Weil’s essays make the Latin stretch into an ethics.
Pali
sati
Keeping-in-mind; a neighbor in practice, a different root and path.
A distant linguistic echo
sati
Pali · A practice of not forgetting; sits beside attention without being it.
How the word shifts
To say “pay attention” already makes it a currency. Older uses were closer to care, to waiting on someone. The laboratory did not invent the stretch. It invented a way of measuring a slice of it.
focus
The body in tendere; the older sense of waiting upon; the ethics Weil heard in it.
A story where the word matters
- The Stream of ThoughtCambridge, Massachusetts · 1890
- The Hours, UncutWestminster · 1925
- The Thief Who Remembers Being a ThiefWestern oak woodlands, and Cambridge aviaries · 1990s–2000s
- Seeing Without SeeingBritain, then many labs · 1974 onward
- Star of GladnessHonolua Bay, Maui, then the ocean toward Tahiti · 1976
Nearby words
Neighbors, not translations of one concept.
From this word
If you had not stretched toward this sentence, where would you be instead?
One question remains
What does this word let us notice that English “consciousness” does not?
It lets us notice that a life is partly a history of what was stretched toward.