Selfish? Moi?

Much excitement recently when Oxford Dictionaries revealed their “Word of the Year”. It was “selfie”, which left observers amused and bemused in equal measure.

A “selfie” is a photograph of one’s self; a self-portrait, in other words, but without the element of craft or artistic skill. The classic “selfie” is snatched with the digital camera in your phone. The lexicographers have found it being used in an online forum as early as 2002: “Um, drunk at a mate’s 21st, I tripped ofer [sic] and landed lip first (with front teeth coming a very close second) on a set of steps. I had a hole about 1cm long right through my bottom lip. And sorry about the focus, it was a selfie.”

The forum was Australian, which goes some way to explaining the form of the word “selfie”. The Australians have a longstanding compulsion to abbreviate things with “-ie”: “barbecue” becomes “barbie”, for instance; “breakfast” becomes “brekkie”. It is said they even abbreviate “firefighter” to “firie”.

The “Word of the Year” is, of course, a marketing exercise designed to remind the world that the Oxford University Press is keeping its ancient finger on the pulse of contemporary life. It won’t be adding “selfie” to the OED until it sees whether it has staying power, and many neologisms do not. Even so, it is a word that says something about the vanity of our times.

“Self” itself is a Germanic word with exactly the same sense as the Latin ipse. Originally it was a pronoun or adjective that emphasised that you were speaking about a specific person. So, in Old English you might say “se selfa man”, which we would now translate as “the very man” or “the same man”. This sort of usage survived into Elizabethan times before dwindling into obscurity, with most of that work being done by the reflexive pronouns, “himself”, “herself”, and so on.

One remnant of that is the use of “self” as a substitute for “myself”, for instance when writing out a cheque. Or you might just use it to be vaguely humorous: “Expect two visitors, self and wife.” The power of “self” for emphasis is preserved in the word “selfsame”, which really only means “same”.

“Self” is also a noun, which emerged from the pronoun use in the latter part of the Anglo-Saxon era. “Myself” and “yourself” were easily modified to “my own self” or “your very self”, and with that “self” was free. Later, it came to express the philosophical idea of one’s own intrinsic being. The OED’s first example is a couplet from the metaphysical poet Thomas Traherne, writing in 1674: “A secret self I had enclosed within / That was not bounded with my clothes or skin.” Thereafter, it was free to represent various aspects of one’s changing nature: “your old self” or “your better self”. And, of course, it stands for that part in all of us that puts our own interests first: “Self is the great Anti-Christ and Anti-God in the World,” said the Nonconformist minister Stephen Charnock, in his Several Discourses Upon The Existence and Attributes of God (1684).

“Selfish”, interestingly, is not recorded before 1640. The OED notes that in his 1693 biography of Archbishop John Williams,  John Hacket claimed the word was of the Presbyterians’ “own new mint”. In our own day it has acquired a new twist, in the shape of Richard Dawkins’ Selfish Gene, a clumsy metaphor. “Selfless”, on the other hand, is not recorded until Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1825 Aids to Reflection, in which he refers to maternal love, “detached and in selfless purity”.

“Selfies” are narcissistic, but it is not an exact parallel. Narcissus fell in love with his reflection, but he took it to be someone else. Not so the selfie-makers, who know what they are doing.