Contentment and Containment
By Tyler
But godliness with contentment is great gain.
1 Timothy 6:6 (KJV)
Recently I started to wonder about what it means to be content. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary1 the word content, is derived from the latin word contentus meaning “Contained, satisfied”, literally “to hold together”. Understanding the provenenance of the word, gave me an insight into what it means to be happy. Contentment is related to completeness, but that the completeness needs be defined by limits. Simply put, those people who are content are they who know their purpose, and don’t seek more or less than that. So understanding your purpose integral to achieving happiness. It will be far harder to be complete (and therefore be content) if you don’t know what it is that makes you complete.
If you, like me enjoy looking into the history of words, and programming on the terminal (I can’t be that unique), then do I have a tool for you. Ety, is a tool I wrote a few months back just for fun. I wanted to write a simple CLI tool that would print out definitions and the etymologies of words from OED. As a “challenge” I wrote it in a way that required no third party dependencies. While it’s nothing big, It is one of my favorite tools I’ve written. It’s easy to install, just copy the script into your path and you’re good to go.
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content (adj.) c. 1400, literally “held or contained within limits,” hence “having the desire limited to present enjoyments,” from Old French content, “satisfied,” from Latin contentus “contained, satisfied,” past participle of continere “to hold together, enclose,” from assimilated form of com “with, together” (see con-) + tenere “to hold” (from PIE root *ten- “to stretch”). Related: Contently (largely superseded by contentedly). ↩︎