A gentleman named Brabantio was once a senator in the Republic of Venice. His daughter, Desdemona, was, as fate would have it, quite beautiful, and he, of course, was quite protecting of her. One young suitor by the name of Roderigo the father had already parried away, but the desperate man called yet again on the senator at home one night, banged on his door, and yelled up to his window, asking the father whether all his family was at home. The senator lost his patience at the curious, insinuating question and yelled back from his balcony, “Why, wherefore ask you this?”
So says Shakespeare in his tragedy Othello. And that senator’s angry reply, in addition to its position in the unfolding drama, happens to stand as a gem for grammar teachers, for in the space of one brief sentence, it illustrates the difference between two logical questions in a way modern English no longer does so concisely. Both why and wherefore are adverbs, but they once had distinct purposes: to ask why means to seek the purpose of something; it looks forward, to the intended effect of an action. To ask wherefore, however, is to look back, to seek the cause of the action having transpired. The two words mark the difference between the logical notions of effect and cause. We, however, no longer use the word wherefore, and so in modern idiom, Brabantio’s retort might be phrased, What has made you ask this and what could you be after in asking me?
This distinct meaning of wherefore has collapsed into why in modern English, and so if you consult a good dictionary, you will find that the adverb why is defined now as for what cause, reason, or purpose. The cause of something points backwards, the reason for it looks either backwards and forward, and its purpose looks forward. These directions of cause and effect, once differentiated, have now been subsumed under the one word why. We will encounter the antiquated wherefore now most often in literature of a certain date. Still, it shows up sometimes where it’s not invited, inflating the prose unnecessarily. The writer Bryan Garner, who has published important reference works on English usage, particularly legal writing, advises lawyers (and by implication the rest of us) in his The Redbook: A Manual on Legal Style (2002) to watch out for wherefore (and some thirty other words and phrases) which “drift along in legal writing like so much deadwood in a stream.” When we do see wherefore, we usually find it as a noun, meaning the explanation or answer for something, especially in the phrase the whys and wherefores, as in, for example, what could have been the whys and wherefores of his erratic behavior?
If there is anything to lament here, it is not that the language has changed; that is inevitable and a good measure better than an unbending strictness that might very well be a sign of life retreating. What is something to worry about, though, is whether we will still perceive in the one word why the two very different logical relations of cause and effect. Brabantio is not simply repeating himself for emphasis when he asks why and wherefore; that is not a dramatic intensification, as if he were asking reiteratively, why, why? Instead, the senator wants to know both the cause that has brought Roderigo to ominously interrupt him at home and the purpose the young man intends by that insolent action—an important distinction we are the poorer for not appreciating.
And poorer still if we miss it when Juliet, elsewhere, laments from her window, O Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo! The beautiful and stricken Juliet is not asking where Romeo might be; she is not looking out from her balcony calling his name in an exclamation to find him (notice that there is no comma after thou to isolate his name and indicate direct address). Instead, she wants to know what it is that has caused him to be in her life. Our modern idiom might say, O Romeo, Romeo! What has made you what you are?, but we can hear that this does not capture the intricacies of his presence which she longs to live out her life with. And that is what we have to be careful about, that we retain the delicate conceptions of our awareness as the language changes. For if language loses its cognitive color, so will much of our life, whose subtleties lie hidden for us to find.
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i read this as i look up from editing 200 of my own pages, and having asked similar questions of so many words along the way, i have now thoroughly saturated my brain with this latest round of pondering the who, what, where and why of a word, wherefore….
Johannes Brahms, a romantic of considerable cognitive color, when setting out to compose a masterpiece would ask himself “whence, wherefore, and whither” to guide his creative process. This notably shaped his Ein deutsches Requiem.
In this age of hip-hop and rap, the classical repertoire seems to have a bad rap but data shows Classical music (which includes the Romantics) commands roughly 4% of global Spotify streams; an unprecedented resurgence among the young digerati.
We need not ask “why” this is happening, but rather “wherefore,” which cause, I submit, could be the thin froth of the next new thing peters out, wherefrom an inherent search for meaning emerges. Our affair with the superficial leading to cultivation of deeper, grounding experiences and authentic connections, which the Old Masters knew, all too well.