The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language

Organic, Organised, Organs

Organic food is food grown in a church organ. Organised crime is crime committed by organists.

Well, etymologically speaking.

Once upon a time, the ancient Greeks had the word organon, which meant something you work with. An organon could be a tool, an implement, a musical instrument or a part of the body. For the moment, let’s stick to the musical sense.

Originally, an organ was any musical instrument, and this was still the case when, in the ninth century, people decided that every church should have a pipe organ in it, for, as Dryden put it: ‘What human voice can reach the sacred organ’s praise?’

Slowly the pipe part of pipe organ got dropped and other instruments ceased to be organs (except the mouth organ, which, if you think about it, sounds a bit rude). And that’s why an organ is now only the musical instrument you have in a church.

Now let’s return to the Greeks, because organ continued to mean a thing you work with and hence a part of the body, as in the old joke: ‘Why did Bach have twenty children? Because he had no stops on his organ.’

A bunch of organs put together make up an organism, and things that are produced by organisms are therefore organic. In the twentieth century, when artificial fertilisers were strewn upon our not-green-enough fields, we started to distinguish between this method and organic farming and thus organic food.

The human body is beautifully and efficiently arranged (at least my body is). Each organ has a particular function. I have a hand to hold a glass, a mouth to drink with, a belly to fill, a liver to deal with the poison and so on and so forth. Heart, head, lungs, liver, kidney and colon: each performs a particular task, and the result, dear reader, is the glory that is I.

If you arrange a group of people and give each one a particular job, you are, metaphorically, making them act together like the organs of a body. You are organising them.

Thus an organisation: something in which each person, like each organ of the body, has a particular task. That shift in meaning happened in the sixteenth century when everybody liked metaphors about the body politic. However, crime didn’t get organised until 1929 in Chicago, when Al Capone was running the mob (or mobile vulgatus to give it its proper name – mob is only a shortening).