The Problem of Transpiration

I have recently read an interesting book, which loooks convincingly scholarly, though I know that some scholars dispute some of its contents. It is titled The Jesus Dynasty, and is written by Professor James D. Tabor. However it is not the subject matter that this blog is concerned with, but Tabor's misuse (several times in his book) of the term 'transpire'. 'Transpire' is built from two Latin elements: trans, meaning 'across' (as in trans-atlantic); and spirare meaning to breathe (animals, including man) or to blow (the wind, literally or metaphorically). Our words spirit and spiritual and inspire derive from the same source.

Transpire thus means 'to breathe' across, or to 'seep through'.  Breath is (or was) thought to be non-material, 'spiritual'.  So the term 'transpire' has been used metaphorically to describe information 'leaked', as it were, probably unintentionally, possibly over a long period.*

Using - or rather misusing - the word as a synonym for 'occur' or 'happen' is plain wrong, and was first recorded from USA in the mid-nineteenth century. And the misuse (some journalist, perhaps, or politician may have used it because it he thought it sounded posh even though he didn't know what it really meant), and it has since become acceptable in USA, where Tabor works and teaches.  [I have just spotted even worse transpirations in Tabor's book: look at this: "There are records of what was transpiring in those areas of Christianity to the West that had been influenced by Paul - but details of what transpired among those who had followed the Teaching represented by the Jesus dynasty were not preserved".]

But I also recently reread Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians, and was delighted to see how appropriately he uses the term:  ". . . although the details of the conversation [between General Gordon and Lord Wolseley] have never transpired, it is known that . . ."   this is intended to refer to the possibility of a slow leak of information over a period of time - a transpiration that, to Strachey's regret, never happened - or, as North Americans might prefer to say, never transpired.

     *    It is a reference not to a happening itself, but to the knowledge of the happening.

The Problem of Transpiration