memoir, early 15th century: from Anglo-French memorie “something written to be kept in mind”
When a member of the British monarchy recently published a memoir, it set off a feeding frenzy. We have an alternative word that is used in a similar way: “autobiography”. But “memoir” or “memoirs”, used interchangeably, seem to have become more popular. Perhaps there’s an echo of “memory”, “remember”, “reminisce”, “memento” in the word “memoir”. We often forget that the meaning of words is not really like a bar of chocolate with the word “chocolate” on the label. Words work in our minds (or we do the work on words) through connotations, connected to our experiences of life and of other words.
This cluster of “mem” words owes its origins to the Ancient Greek goddess of memory, Mnemosyne, and to an even more ancient word in Proto-Indo-European – “men” meaning “to think”. More recently than this, “memoir” came to us via 12th-century French. It was first used in English (Middle English as it was then) to mean a memorandum – as with diplomats passing notes to each other.
Its use to describe a life story, or an account of events, starts a little later. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, in 1659 one J. Pearson wrote that “Pontius Pilate kept the Memoirs of Jewish affairs”. By 1762, we have Lawrence Sterne writing in the inimitable and ground-breaking novel Tristram Shandy about the “memoirs of my uncle Toby’s courtship”. Leap forward another century to 1818 and Samuel Smith comments, “Any one who provides good dinners for clever people, and remembers what they say, cannot fail to write entertaining memoirs.” Scientists found a parallel use for the word, to refer to the proceedings of a learned society, and so we find memoirs on a “petrifaction mixed with shells”, “a Michigan mud-hole” and “the weather of Scotland”.
A wisecrack credited to, of all people, Marshal Pétain (the head of Vichy France 1940-44) appeared in the Observer in 1946: “To write one’s memoirs is to speak ill of everybody except oneself.” Reluctant as people might be to quote Pétain as an authority, this thought seems to have survived the test of time.
This piece is from the New Humanist spring 2023 edition. Subscribe here.
