The expression for taking care in Italian is prendere cura; Curar, in Spanish, means to cure. To care is to cure. Both verbs come from the Latin cura: to care, to tend, to heal. Accurate, curator, and secure also share such roots.
The Latin tendere—to stretch, to tense—provides the root for the ways we say that we care, that we try, and that we are soft and easily injured. It’s the origin word for ‘tenderness,’ ‘intent,’ and ‘attention.’
In English, attention is something you pay. In Spanish, it is something you lend, and in German, something you gift. You “do” attention in Italian and French. Does our relationship with attention change depending on whether we do attention_,_ or gift it, or _lend_it? In day to day language, paying attention is often interchangeable with taking care.
The quest for attention is an invitation to care. These parallel expressions are similar in other languages. Words recognize that attention—as a gift, a loan, or payment—is a form of care.
our experience of the world changes language just as languages change our perception of the world
Since the late 14th Century, tendere has transformed into a word to define the devotion of our time and concentration. The word “attention” was rare in English before the 1700s and in the mid-1700s meant “consideration, observant care” and “civility, courtesy.” A bit over a century later it was defined as “power of mental concentration.” Before landing on the action verb ‘pay,’ the word attention was used with a variety of familiar verbs: gather, attract, call, and draw. Merriam Webster’s current first definition of attention is as wide as it is poetic: “the act or state of applying the mind to something.” Can there be a more careful act than that of applying the mind to something?
We were a species without a word for “attention” for hundreds of years. We created it relatively recently, and have since shaped it. Time enhances the magic of the vernacular. Historically, attention has been a courtesy. Something you offer as a gift, as a caring act. But today, it’s a commodity, an asset distributed to the highest bidder in our daily lives. Ensnared in the cycle of having our attention hijacked, we’re losing the agency of the offer.
In its familiar sense, Phillips writes, attention-seeking “is a way of wanting something without knowing what it is. A social ability, an appeal to others to help us with our wanting.” To be and make others comfortable with our attention-seeking, we transform it into art, or success, or likable public snippets of our lives. If we were to take these gestures in the literal sense, maybe all we’re trying to communicate is that we want to be cared for.
In How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell argues that given the contemporary politics of attention, to actively choose who or what to hear or see “forms the ground not only for love, but for ethics.” As people and corporations discuss and capitalize on the monetization of our attention, I want to reclaim attention as an act of care. Maybe, if we borrow from other languages and treat attention as a gift or an action—rather than a payment or a loan—we might be able to better communicate what we need and care for what others offer. Besides, at the heart of the word is its legacy: to tend to someone or something.
References
Castro, J. (2021, June 15). Tenderness Shares A Root With Attention. Are.Na. https://www.are.na/blog/tenderness-shares-a-root-with-attention