The blade of a ploughshare
‘Culture’ is said to be one of the two or three most complex words in the English language, and the term which is sometimes considered to be its opposite—nature—is commonly awarded the accolade of being the most complex of all. Yet though it is fashionable these days to see nature as a derivative of culture, culture, etymologically speaking, is a concept derived from nature. One of its original meanings in ‘husbandry’, or the tending of natural growth. The same is true of our words for law and justice, as well as of terms like ‘capital’, ‘stock’, ‘pecuniary’ and ‘sterling’. The word ‘coulter’, which is a cognate of ‘culture’, means the blade of a ploughshare. We derive our word for the finest of human activities from labour and agriculture, crops and cultivation. Francis Bacon writes of ‘the culture and manurance of minds’, in a suggestive hesitancy between dung and mental distinction. ‘Culture’ here means an activity, and it was a long time before the word came to denote entity.
—Terry Eagleton in The Idea of Culture
