On the 6th of August 1991, the English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee launched the first CERN web page, created the first web browser and actually invented the World Wide Web. The man had ideas!
However, the vision for an intelligent global network, which collects the human knowledge, is credited to the Belgian bibliophile Paul Otlet in the 1930s. His work on organising the world knowledge resulted in a massive monumental collection called the “Mundaneum”.
It was an ambitious and idealistic concept that sparked the birth of the information era. And it is only one of the many revolutionary ideas that keep the world going.
The word idea had different forms in the Middle English – ideie, ydea, ydeye, idaea. The origin of the word idea, recorded into British sources around 8th century, comes from Classic Latin. In Platonic philosophy idea is an abstract or eternally existing pattern of any kind of thing, in relation to which particular things are conceived as imperfect copies.
In the post-classical Latin sources the word had the main meaning of “form, image, likeness”.
It was, once again, John Trevisa to firstly use the word in print in his translation of the early encyclopaedia De Proprietatibus Rerum (On the Properties of Things) in the meaning of an “example, form”.
One of the first translated Latin texts into English, is the John Lydgate’s translation of Fall of Princes, originally by Giovanni Boccaccio. The book is about the reversals in the fortunes, tragedies and downfall of men and women of power and operates in the popular for the time medieval genre of “advice to princes”.
The translation of John Lydgate is dated circa 1439: “In the two schools of prudent Socrates And of Plato…… the key of secret mysteries and of divine Ideas.”
From the end of the 16th century onwards, the word idea came to dominate with its two main meanings of “a recall of memory of something previously seen or experienced” and “a mental image and concept based on knowledge” Interestingly, those meaning of the word derived from the Greek word ennoia, originally “act of thinking”.
The universal “to have no idea” phrase firstly appeared in print in 1782, in Frances Burney’s Cecilia: “I assure you when I got home my feet were all blisters. You have no idea how they smarted”.
Did the quote bring the image of smart feet? Now you get the main idea of the word idea and how our brain creates images based on our knowledge! The verb ”smart”, related to the German “schmerzen”, actually had the original sense of “causing sharp pain”.
