I recently recorded a podcast episode for Ut Silvae Foliis, a series of reflections on Latin words as documented in the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, the world’s foremost Latin dictionary. While a postdoctoral fellow at the TLL in 2016/2017, I had the great fortune to learn about an inexhaustible diversity of Latin authors, and this 15-minute audio essay was a welcome opportunity to revisit the Thesaurus and its sources.
I chose to discuss the verb proficio, perhaps best translated in English as “to progress” or “to improve.” Over the course of a millennium, this verb appears in an almost-overwhelming array of texts, all of which raise provocative issues about our own notions of “improvement.” What does it mean to “be better” or to “become better”? What does it mean for someone or something to “progress”? These are difficult questions that straddle the domains of lexicography and intellectual history. Even if the TLL can’t settle a perennial problem like the definition of “progress,” it can nevertheless give us a glimpse at how our predecessors have wrestled with these intractable matters.