Taking Aim at ‘Toxic’

We don’t have a good antonym for toxic, by the way, as if the concept itself could only be negated (untoxic, atoxic, and so on) while refusing to give way to something concrete and positive. (“No, it’s good for you!” isn’t really an antonym to toxic.)

Antidote doesn’t quite do it. That word comes from the Greek meaning “to give again,” especially in the sense of giving as a counter to something earlier. But that’s not quite toxic’s antonym, however much appreciated it would be in moments of, well, intoxication. Nor is remedy, repair, fix, or their ilk.

Readers who have followed the discussion of toxic’s new celebrity will know that the word comes from the ancient Greek term toxikon pharmakon meaning “poison for arrows.” If your mind now turns to curare on the tips of Amazonian darts, you’ve got the picture.

In his Dissemination, Derrida worries Plato’s Phaedrus to play out the possibility that a poison contains its own remedy, at least philosophically speaking. Lingua Franca readers inclined to natural healing techniques will know that treating a patient with a small quantity of something associated with the illness itself is called homeopathy. The term dates only to 1824, though the practice is much older.

Archery isn’t a symptom of toxic masculinity, but it’s to the history of writing about archery that we now swerve.

In 1545, the English humanist Roger Ascham presented Henri VIII with his Toxophilus, the first text in the English language on archery (“Toxophilus” means “the lover of archery,” here put in dialogue with “Philologus,” the lover of learning, or at least of words). Ascham was tutor to Princess (later Queen) Elizabeth, and a prominent educator during the reigns of Henry’s other children, Edward VI and Mary.

Ascham had to defend archery as a gentleman’s pursuit, a gesture the politics of which seems pretty remote to us in the 21st century. The significance of Toxophilus, though, is that it stands as one of the first educational works written in the English tongue.

Ascham is a teacher at heart, keen to explain what fletchers and bowyers (makers of arrows and bows) do, why a “school of shooting” — meaning the teaching of archery, however much the phrase “school of shooting” chills us in 2018 – is something that even a lover of learning might appreciate.

I wanted to bring Ascham a bit more into view, initially because of his defense of archery, or toxophily, but also because of his more famous (and now equally unread) book, The Scholemaster, published in 1570, two years after its author’s death.

If you work in higher ed,  The Scholemaster isn’t likely to be on your syllabus. It’s about how to teach Latin, which few of us do these days. But it’s also a book very much of our current moment in that it’s about teaching itself.

Let the child be taught ”cherefullie and plainlie,” Ascham writes, and go easy with the corporal punishment.

“For, the scholer, is commonlie beat for the making, when the master were more worthie to be beat for the mending, or rather, marring of the same: The master many times, being as ignorant as the childe, what to saie properlie and fitlie to the matter.”

Or, as we might ask today: When the student fails, how much responsibility does the teacher bear?

If Ascham doesn’t make explicit the connection between Toxophilus and The Scholemaster, we can do it for him. The arrow of education has a target, and the love of teaching well – any subject, any audience, really – can be a kind of toxophilia.

I doubt that that alone can ransom toxic from current usage, but as this brief detour into language history is meant to show, there’s always some light hidden in even the most aversive words, in academia and beyond.

As for our current concern with labeling things as toxic, the point is surely not only to neutralize the term and its manifestations, but to embrace and celebrate the thing that’s the opposite of the term. Not “not being toxic” but being, positively, something else.

Now that’s an educational target to aim for.