You're the Topos

Looking for a language of the commonplace.

A topos is a place. You may find this disappointing if you came here hoping for little plates of meat and cheese. But that’s tapas, a word that came from Gothic into Spanish, where it now means “lids.” Which is what the Spaniards call it when the waiter brings you a nice little morsel with your drink and carries it to your table on the top of your glass like a lid.

So in English, “tapas” came to mean an advanced technique for selling appetizer portions at main course prices to the kinds of diners who’ll pay extra for “culture.” This doubtless gives the staff a sense of poetic justice as they tuck into an extra-large burrito after a long day of watching rich toffs nibble ruefully at cubes of ham. But I digress.

The Greek word topos means a place or a general area. In a metaphorical sense, it came to mean an image or a rhetorical technique you revisit again and again. Vaudevillians know you can always trot out a crowd favorite if you’re starting to bomb. So do politicians, but I repeat myself. When in doubt, fall back on the old standards: tell a joke or a heartwarming story. Blame the other guy. Or for the more scrupulous, show a connection between cause and effect. Present a number of alternatives and weigh their relative merits. These are the topoi, the places, that you can always come back to.

If a topos is reliable enough to become common, it’s a koinos topos, or in Latin a locus communis: a common place. That’s how certain images and sentiments become “commonplace,” in which case they might bore you to tears, or half to death, or stiff, or stupid, or silly. People used to go around with little notebooks called “commonplace books,” in which they’d write quotes or observations that were so penetrating they were likely to be applicable in a number of different situations.

Quotes from commonplace books were useful in conversation on a range of “topics,” a word meaning “of or related to a particular topos.” Which is how a word for a specific place came to describe something you could use basically everywhere.

What is commonplace must have broad appeal, which isn’t surprising since the word “place” comes from French, which got it from Latin, which got it from the Greek plateia hodos, meaning “wide, flat street.” Wide is the way and flat the path that leadeth unto perdition, but they say the neon lights are bright on Broadway, so it can’t be that bad. Anyway in a flat open space there’s lots of room and places to stand or walk, which is how we eventually got the word. So if you’re in the public square making ordinary observations about topical matters, that’s commonplace commentary in a common place.

The problem is we don’t really seem to have that much in common these days, which was driven home once again this week when Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker gave a commencement address at a Catholic school called Benedictine College. Butker told the girls, “I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world.” Liberals obviously took umbrage, but so did some conservative women, including Catholic homemakers—because, they said, it’s not that simple.

Yes, for most women, homemaking is a high calling and a profound source of fulfillment. But it’s also often best integrated into the center of a life filled with other things, including some type of work in the world—a fact which the more hackneyed caricatures of “tradlife” online seem to miss. In other words, happy homes don’t just depend on women. They need a context, which is what happens when you weave (texere) together (con) a network of economic and social threads that make family life healthy, sustainable, and feasible.

It’s not my place to pronounce in absolute terms on the right balance of roles between man and wife. But it does strike me that two things can be true at once: Butker was making a generalized statement that held good among his audience and that also, like any generalized statement, failed to capture the full detail of any human life or to function in a vacuum. It’s a topos that also needs context.

And in fact you always need both. We have to have ideals and archetypes to function, and we also have to know that no single individual ever, anywhere, has actually embodied an archetype. They’re templates, not people. They work best, I think, as road maps for communities rather than scripts for individuals. Some charity is called for here, because this is genuinely hard to get right—especially now when conditions are changing so rapidly and so many powerful forces are arrayed against the ordinary, the generally valid, the widely popular.

We are constantly expected to orient our lives around the most outlandish outliers, to make room for exceptions to the general rule—the more extravagant, the better, or how else would we know how tolerant we are? But what we need to make room for most of all is not some intersectionally oppressed minority. What we’re looking for, I think, is a humane language for describing that broad, spacious, shared land known as the common place.

Rejoice evermore,
Spencer

Image: Elemaki, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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