Altitude

1. Altitude

The English word ‘altitude’ is derived from the Latin verb alo, meaning both ‘I nourish or rear’ and ‘I increase or make to grow’. Its perfect participle passive altus, which literally means ‘having been increased/made to grow’, came to be used as an adjective meaning both ‘high’ (i.e., as seen from below) and ‘deep’ (i.e., as seen from above). The substantive altum can mean both ‘the deep’, as in the high sea, and ‘(high) heaven’. Therefore, height and depth came to be covered by the same word. Whether one goes up or down is perhaps immaterial.

An interesting and profound example of the Latinate use of the word altitude occurs in English in Shakespeare’s play, King Lear. In Act 4, Scene 6, which takes place at Dover, the disguised Edgar is trying to persuade his blinded father, Gloucester, that he has fallen from a high cliff and that his life has been providentially saved:

‘Hadst thou been aught but gossamer, feathers, air,
So many fathom down precipitating,
Thou’dst shiver’d like an egg; but thou dost breathe,
Hast heavy substance, bleed’st not, speak’st, art sound.
Ten masts at each make not the altitude
Which thou hast perpendicularly fell:
Thy life’s a miracle.’
(lines 49-55)

Here altitude means both ‘height’ and ‘depth’. One can fall from a height, but one doesn’t fall a certain height because one falls down rather than up. The extraordinary thing about Shakespeare’s use of the word here is its interior richness. Gloucester really is falling up as well as down, for in addition to symbolizing his descent in the social scale his fall from the cliff symbolizes a spiritual ascent. Indeed, in a telling parody and illumination of the temptation of Christ, Edgar in effect says to his father when they stand together on the edge of the (illusory) cliff, ‘If thou be the Sonne of God, cast thyself down…’ He does; he is. The ascent cannot happen without the descent.

The fact that Gloucester’s fall is imaginary and has been orchestrated by his son gives the word ‘altitude’ a further connotative depth. For the place where we can both fall and rise at the same time is the human imagination. Maybe, then, ‘altitude’ meaning both ‘depth’ and ‘height’ is the means by which we can measure the quality of our imaginative impulses.

Latin Illuminations

I shall be taking a different English word each week and attempting to cast new light on its meaning by looking at the Latin word or words from which it derives.