Monetizing the sacred. Some thoughts on a word and a meaning.
The other day, reading the very engaging Ships of Heaven, a book about a ‘curated’ [my word] selection of British cathedrals, I was struck by the author’s use of the verb ‘to monetize’.
‘Struck’ for several reasons. (Actually, four – I think – as we’ll see.) First, because the context in which they used it put the Middle Ages slap bang in your face in a way that forced me ‘to sit up and take notice’.
(I insert quotation marks round that phrase because, as the late Professor John Sinclair taught and amply illustrated, a vast amount of our language – much more than we might like to think – consists of ready-made phrases. And that is but one of thousands – or even tens of thousands.)
‘As I was saying’ before I ‘so rudely interrupted’ myself, the author is describing how in mediaeval England it would ‘hugely benefit’ a cathedral or abbey to have a saint or two of some kind to whose shrine the faithful came as pilgrims and, en passant, left a coin or two, to swell the abbatial/monastic/episcopal coffers.
After all, those cathedrals and abbeys needed loadza money for the stonemasons and master craftsmen, not to mention the stone – nor the abbot’s or bishop’s table.
The cathedral is Hereford, and its saint is St Thomas Cantilupe (nope, nothing to do with those melons: note the exact spelling), the top part of whose original shrine has been splendidly – or gaudily, according to taste – restored. The saintly bishop, also Chancellor of Oxford (eat your heart out, Chris Patten), was bishop ‘for a few short years’. (I’ll stop the quotation marks now; I think I’ve proved Prof. Sinclair’s point.)
Thomas fell out with the Archbish of Canterbury over a matter of land ownership. Falling out then wasn’t like being ‘unfriended’ on F’book. No, sirree. The AofC excommunicated him, which meant – long story short – he would have zero chance of getting into Heaven.
But our Thomas was no pussy (slang, mostly U.S.) and set out to Italy to argue his case with Pope Martin IV. There he succumbed – possibly to a batch of rancid lasagne (no, I’m just making that up) – and died at Orvieto, where, as Grahame Greene’s narrator in Travels with My Aunt quipped: ‘I would have thought he was very lucky to die in Orvieto rather than in Hereford. A small civilized place even today with a far, far better climate and an excellent restaurant in the Via Garibaldi.’
The flesh was boiled from his body and interred near Orvieto, his heart ended up in Hertfordshire, and his bones came back to Hereford to be entombed in a f**k-off shrine. (Note to self: check that funeral plan you signed up to a while back. No boiling!) And if you note a certain cynicism creeping in here, it’s all because of that ruddy monetize.
The relevant passage from the book runs like this: ‘… there was a strong desire to have him canonized, not least among the secular canons of Hereford Cathedral who knew the potential for monetizing a saintly shrine.’ (p.181, p’back)
Image: the ‘Golden Window’ or ‘Paternoster Window’ at St Laurence’s, Ludlow. Mid-1450s. Nowt to do with Cantilupe, but the easiest mediaeval image I could lay my hands on because I took it myself.
The second aspect of monetizing is, of course, the spelling. Should it be –ise or –ize? I’ve written extensively about this ‘thorny issue’ here and here and here. FWIW, its first citation in English according to the OED (1867) is in the form monetize, but that proves absolutely nothing at all: the next (1903 ) citation uses the –ise spelling. And although the word as a string of letters is as old as 1867, the meaning that concerns us here is as recent as 1998: ‘To exploit (a product, service, audience, etc.) so that it generates revenue.’ Hence, it can feel relatively novel to some people.
It’s all about eyeballs, audience acquisition… Growth lies in the ability to monetize those eyeballs.
Boston Globe 14 January c6/6
And, like so many useful additions to the English wordhoard, it’s an originally U.S. neologism as the above citation shows.
On the –ize/ise issue, it’s worth stating that Professor Lynne Murphy has shown how the –ise spelling has undergone a huge revival in British English since the 1990s, almost as a ‘badge of honour’ for being British. I’m shouting quietly here: IT’S AN ABSOLUTE NONSENSE TO THINK THAT THE -IZE SPELLING IS AN ‘AMERICAN IMPOSITION’ .
Third, what about pronunciation? I suspect most of us link it to money (‘Money makes the world go around, money, money, money, money’ etc.) and therefore pronounce the first syllable accordingly.
But, if you didn’t know the word has anything to do with money, the rules of English could suggest that first o is as in hot [ɒ]. AI would, anyway, I’m sure. As it turns out, the New English Dictionary of 1907 (the OED as we now know it) gave precisely that pronunciation: /ˈmɒnɪtaɪz/.
Fourth and finally, the shape of monetise/-ize. From 1900 until 2023 the OED records no fewer than 511 new verbs ending in the OED’s style of –ize. Taking the first ten as they appear, that is, ‘in no particular order’, hospitalize, customize, finalize, prioritize, destabilize, fantasize, randomize, contextualize, empathize and operationalize, it’s clear that the –ize suffix is clamped onto a noun or adjective base with minimum disruption, e.g. contextual + –ize, fantasy + –ize, and so forth.
Which doesn’t account for monetize. Had AI been asked to verbify money, would it have come up with monetize? I don’t think so. It would have spat out the moneyize/-se that exists in vanishingly small numbers on the interweb.
What happened with monetize is that whoever coined it resorted to our Latin heritage and used the Latin word monēta, As the OED puts it, ‘A borrowing from Latin, combined with an English element.’
I suppose that’s in the same Latinising vein as the old-fashioned l.s.d. or £.s.d. for ‘pounds, shilling and pence’, librae, solidi, denarii.
Finally, it tickles me more than it should (I don’t get out much) that that Latin monēta through various twists and turns ends up even in German and Danish – as, of course, in the Romance languages, including Romanian – as the word for ‘coin’: German die Münze from Old High German Muniʒʒa from Latin; Danish mønt from Middle Low German Münte. Not to mention Russian монета.
(English coin comes via Old French from the Latin cuneum, accusative, ‘wedge’. The die to stamp coins was wedge-shaped and the word transferred to the product of the die.)
