It’s been a while since Word Daily delivered a genuine belter, but this week’s effort was worth the wait. The word was autochthonous, which sounds less like a piece of vocabulary and more like either a Greek philosopher from Kirkcaldy or a forgotten progressive rock album from 1974. (Bruce Soord, if you’re reading this, I apologise in advance, because somewhere in Britain there is almost certainly a man called Nigel explaining the deeper meaning of Autochthonous while playing a seventeen-minute bass solo to six people in a village hall).
The actual meaning is pretty cool actually. Autochthonous means native to a place, indigenous, originating where it belongs. In ancient Greece it referred to people who were literally thought to have sprung from the earth itself. Nowadays it mostly refers to plants, animals, cultures and communities, although I am at this moment trying to work out where I can feed it into my every day conversation, to irritate the hell out of members of my family.
NB: There comes a point in every middle-aged man’s life when he realises he has become exactly the sort of person he used to mock. For some it’s cycling holidays. For others it’s vinyl, real ale, or becoming interested in different types of compost. Mine appears to be getting over excited by obscure vocabulary and then looking for opportunities to deploy it.
Most people return from holiday with photographs. I come back with obscure words, opinions about railway stations and detailed observations about public transport systems that nobody requested and nobody particularly wants to hear.
A year on from wandering around Japan, while the famous sights were every bit as impressive as advertised, the bits I still find myself talking about are often the smaller and more local ones. The old bloke tending vegetables beside a railway line in Nikko. The tiny restaurant with six seats and no English menu. The shop that appeared to sell exactly one thing because, several generations ago, a family had collectively decided that making this one thing exceptionally well was a perfectly reasonable way to spend the rest of their existence.
The thing that appealed to me about those places wasn’t nostalgia. It certainly wasn’t resistance to change. Japan is hardly a country that fears modernity. It was simply the sense that these places belonged where they were. They couldn’t easily be copied and pasted into an airport terminal in Dubai or a retail park outside Milton Keynes. They were products of local history, local culture and local people.
In other words, they were autochthonous.
The more I travel, the more I find myself appreciating that quality. For all the benefits of globalisation, and there are many, we’ve become remarkably good at making places look and feel similar. You can fly halfway around the world and still find the same coffee chains, the same fashion brands, the same playlists and increasingly the same conversations. Entire districts of major cities now resemble airport lounges that have somehow escaped and colonised the surrounding streets.
That’s brilliant when you’re hungry, jetlagged and desperately searching for a flat white. It’s slightly less brilliant when you realise that everywhere is beginning to feel a little bit like everywhere else.
Perhaps that’s why I find myself increasingly fond of the things that refuse to conform. Yorkshire isn’t Berkshire. Glasgow isn’t Edinburgh. Airdrie isn’t - well - anywhere else, which anyone who has spent five minutes there will happily confirm. The accents are different, the humour is different and the stories people tell themselves about where they live are different too.
The same applies to the local band playing to fifty people on a Friday night, the family café that has somehow survived three recessions, two ownership changes and the arrival of every chain imaginable, or the football club that has disappointed successive generations of your family while somehow remaining central to your identity. Rationally none of this makes much sense. Emotionally? It makes perfect sense.
That’s because the differences are the point.
I’m not arguing against progress, technology or internationalism. Anyone who has listened to me talk about Japan’s railways for more than thirty seconds will know that. What I am arguing for is a little appreciation for the things that could only have happened there, in that place, among those people. The odd traditions, the local businesses, the community institutions and the quirks that make somewhere feel distinct rather than interchangeable.
Maybe that’s why the word appealed to me. Not because it makes me sound clever, although I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t part of the attraction, but because it reminds us that not everything needs to be optimised, scaled, modernised or transformed into a global brand experience.
Some things are valuable precisely because they belong where they are.
Otherwise we risk ending up in a world where every high street sells the same things, every city centre feels vaguely familiar and every conversation sounds as though it has been assembled by the same algorithm.
And Archie Autochthonous of Kirkcaldy would never have stood for that.
https://worddaily.com/words/autochthonous/?lctg=2e294143-a1e0-470c-8ef7-69823b3a3257