Rendering with fat, plaster or song

NB The gist of this post is a repeat of an earlier one a couple of years ago. But there are one or two refinements. It was about getting lost in the course of a conversation or reading written text.

This is not to do with 'losing yourself' in a novel, or even straining your eyesight; but about the way we can be misled by reading a wrong meaning or significance into a word.

The trouble is that perfectly good words (that is, words whose meaning should be clear) gain more and more 'associations' as time goes on, until readers and listeners can never be quite sure what the writer or speaker is implying. Here's an instance; a choir is going to contribute some items to a church Carol Service. Obviously it is fair enough to say that they are going to sing them. But to say that they are going to perform them might be thought inappropriate for such an event. Performances, the church people may feel, are what you get from big egos, amateur theatricals, rock bands, circuses or conjurers. Not quite what we go to church for. The church may well have an audience for a choir on Saturday, but will have a congregation on Sunday. The good people may feel free to 'put their hands together' and applaud on Saturday; but prefer to go no further than perhaps to smile and nod their approval on Sunday. Yet the word 'audience' means no more nor less than 'listeners'; and 'congregation' means no more nor less than 'getting together'. There is no essential reason why one should not speak of a congregation on the Saturday and an audience on the Sunday - except for the words' associations. We might even risk the term 'assembly' - which our eighteenth century forbears enjoyed - but that has been hijacked by politics.

Our forefathers had hijacked a quite different word for what one does to a song - a word that to them must have sounded more dignified than 'performing' and more meaningful than the rather plain 'singing'. They liked a song to be 'rendered'. But we also use the verb 'render' for heating and purifying cooking fat, and for plastering a wall. And look what happened to its noun 'rendition'. Render was never a very satisfactory word for 'performing', but now its associations have spoilt it entirely.

‘Render’’ derives (via French) from Latin ‘reddere’, meaning to ‘give back' - originally referring to a learner reciting to a teacher or catechist what he or she has just learned . Maybe it's not so inappropriate for performing in a concert, after all: it just sounds pretentious and old-fashioned.

Talking of parish priests (well, we were getting pretty close); it was not unusual a few generations ago for a clergyman to earn a reputation as a 'painful preacher'. This referred not to his excruciating delivery, or even to the way wooden benches seemed to get more and more uncomfortable the longer the sermon dragged on; but referred to the painstaking preparation of his 'addresses'. And even this last term now has associations with post-codes and websites. And minor traffic misdemeanours: I am afraid I must ask for your name and address, sir.

As for the fat and the plaster, the evolution of the significance of 'render' is not easy to follow: but the key concept may lie in the notion of 'treating' something in a way that gives it new form - whether it be a musical performance in a concert hall, butcher's fat in a pan or lime slaked and spread on a wall.

Rendering with fat, plaster or song