austraLasia 931
Youth Meet: a moot point. Would it do for 'Confronto'?
ROME: 30th October '04 -- >From time to time we see it in a headline: India will host Youth Meet, an excellent example from The Times of India (Indiatimes). The story in itself is interesting: Bangalore, December 7th-9th next, World Youth Peace Summit, not Salesian inspired nor the point of this article; meet as a noun, is!
English is a widely-owned language, and therefore has almost unlimited flexibility - almost. Salesians across six continents employ English as a first language, a second and regular tongue for carrying out the mission, an occasional third - English is hard to avoid, globally - or a fair-to-middling fourth, to keep in touch with old friends.
Should we be surprised, then, to find meet, the noun, in our regular Salesian employ? No, but not for the reason one might deduce from the previous paragraph. Is it a back-formation then, formed from the more usual meeting, a neologism from the USA, where it is commonly found in sports headlines such as Track Meet in Columbus, or is it plain confusion between verb and noun?
None of the above I would suggest. Meet is an old word resuscitated, or which has never died out, rather, since its regular use in the 13th century. It was in common use for the gathering of people at a fox hunt until very recently - now banned, glory be to God! It was a short shift from there to any sports gathering, hence its common use to describe track and field events.
Less known would be its connection with moot. Nowadays moot is mainly an adjective, a moot point, but still, in parts of England a noun, a meeting hall, while the legal fraternity know it for what older Salesians termed a 'casus', a weekly hypothetical moral case argued as an exercise. A Moot, however, did not become a meet through the great English vowel shift - we would have expected maut from that, after all a mouse, pronounced [moos] still by the Scots who are unlikely to make any shift towards anything English, is a mouse, pronounced [maus], for the rest of us. Moot became meet by taking a trip through Middle Dutch and German first.
As for meeting, which British English would much prefer to meet, it is as old as Beowulf, the oldest surviving epic in British literature (10th century or before), where a gemeting was equivalent to a convention or council, and several centuries older than moot or meet. As a personal preference I'd give age the right-of-way in this case, but can we deny youth its place in history? If they want to meet, let them have their meet. In an older liturgical phrase we would say it is meet and just!
In fact, since we are hard put to find a suitable English equivalent for Confronto (as in Confronto 2004, the gathering of young people from all over Europe at Colle Don Bosco), perhaps Meet is the way to go.
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'austraLasia' is an email service for the Salesian Family of Asia-Pacific. It functions also as an agency for ANS, based in Rome. Try also www.bosconet.aust.com Is it Becchi or The Becchi or untranslatable as I Becchi? For further comment cf. Lexisdb
