Today’s word of the day, courtesy of the Dictionary Project’s daily email, is sooth. It is pronounced with a voiceless th sound, as in both, rather than a voiced th sound, as in smooth. The IPA spelling is / suθ /. There is a verb soothe, pronounced so that it rhymes with smooth, but it means something different. Well, sort of, as we’ll see in a minute. Sooth can be an adjective or a noun. As an adjective, it means “true; real; faithful” though it can also mean “soft; smooth; soothing; sweet; delightful.” As a noun, it means “truth; reality.” Dictionary Project calls all of these definitions “archaic,” meaning that nobody speaking contemporary English uses the word in those ways.

We find sooth in Old English as “soð ‘truth, justice, righteousness, rectitude; reality, a true situation, certainty,’ noun use of soð (adj.) ‘true, genuine, real; just, righteous,’ originally *sonð-, from Proto-Germanic *santhaz (source also of Old Norse sannr, Old Saxon soth, Old High German sand ‘true,’ Gothic sunja ‘truth’)” (https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=sooth). The website adds, “Archaic in English, it is the root of modern words for “true” in Swedish (sann) and Danish (sand). It was in common use until mid-17c. then obsolete until revived as an archaism early 19c. by Scott, etc.

So what is the connection to the verb soothe? It appears in Middle English as “sothen, from Old English soðian ‘show to be true, bear witness, offer confirmation’ (senses now obsolete), from soð ‘true’ (see sooth). The sense of ‘quiet, comfort, restore to tranquility,’ in reference to a person or animal, is by 1690s, via the notion of ‘to assuage one by asserting that what he says is true,’ a sense attested from 1560s (and compare Old English gesoð ‘a parasite, flatterer’). The meaning ‘reduce the intensity’ (of a pain, etc.) is from 1711” (ibid.). So the original meaning of to soothe was to say, “That’s fine; we all believe you” to someone who was telling an outrageous story. I get the feeling that, perhaps, there has been too much soothing going on in our country of late.

According to the On This Day website, on this date in 1885, King Leopold II of Belgium formed the Congo Free State.

Belgium is a small country in northwestern Europe, surrounded by the Netherlands, Germany, Luxembourg, and France. It is named after the Belgae, an ancient people who dominate the norther part of Gaul. The history of Belgium prior to the 19^th century is one of being a pawn of other countries. At the end of the 18^th century, the country was annexed by the French Republic. When Napoleon was driven from power in 1815, the lowland countries were bound together as the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, but the Belgians were not happy with this arrangement, and in 1830, they rebelled against the Netherlands and became their own country, a constitutional monarchy under Leopold I (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgium).

Leopold II (1835-1909) was Leopold I’s oldest surviving son when the king died in 1865. He was a cousin of Queen Victoria and the son-in-law of the Archduke Joseph of Austria. He came into a world that was gradually outgrowing monarchies, and he knew it. According to Adam Hochschild, writing for Britannica, “The royal coffers would become a central focus of Leopold’s life, and he once grumbled to German Emperor William II while watching a parade in Berlin, ‘There is really nothing left for us kings except money!’” (https://www.britannica.com/place/Congo-Free-State).  

The latter half of the 19^th century saw Europe’s “Scramble for Africa,” when European countries, by hook or by crook, turned most of sub-Saharan Africa into colonies. Belgium, a small country without a navy, was very late to the game. But Leopold II devised a way to get his share. And it really was his share.

He persuaded the United States and the powers of Europe to recognize the Congo area of Africa as his personal property. He employed Henry Morton Stanley (1841-1904; he of the famous “Dr. Livingstone, I presume”) to travel the Congo basin making treaties with local tribal leaders, many of whom could not read. Then he exploited the people of what he ironically named the Congo Free State to make him wealthy, first with ivory and then with rubber: “One lucrative source of wild rubber was the Landolphia vines in the great Central African rainforest, and no one owned more of that area than Leopold. Detachments of his 19,000-man private army, the Force Publique, would march into a village and hold the women hostage, forcing the men to scatter into the rainforest and gather a monthly quota of wild rubber. As the price of rubber soared, the quotas increased, and as vines near a village were drained dry, men desperate to free their wives and daughters would have to walk days or weeks to find new vines to tap” (ibid.).

In 1899, Blackwood’s Magazine published a novella by a Polish-British writer named Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski (1847-1924). That writer is known today by his pen name, Joseph Conrad, and the novella is called Heart of Darkness. Conrad had actually spent some time on a steamboat that plied the waters of the Congo River, and he took the story from his own experiences. While on the surface it might seem as if the heart of darkness is the center of Africa, the real heart of darkness is the heart of Leopold II, who professed a desire to evangelize the “savages” of central Africa and bring them civilization, but whose real desire was to increase his personal wealth.

There were other people in Europe who were influential in ending the terror that was Leopold’s Congo Free State, but Conrad played his part. At a time when Leopold II was using his stolen wealth to build arches and fund all kinds of activities, in an effort to buy the love of the people of Belgium, Conrad helped to reveal the truth of what was going on. Despite being fiction, his work was sooth.

Today’s image: “’In The Rubber Coils. Scene – The Congo “Free” State’ [by Edward] Linley Sambourne depicts King Leopold II of Belgium as a snake attacking a Congolese rubber collector” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Free_State_propaganda_war#/media/File:Punch_congo_rubber_cartoon.jpg).