Spirit, from breath: pneuma and spiritus

Say these words slowly: inspire, expire, respire, aspire, perspire, conspire. They share a hidden verb. The Latin spirare means to breathe. To inspire is to breathe in. To expire is to breathe out. To respire is to breathe again. To aspire is to breathe toward something. To perspire is to breathe through. And to conspire, in Latin conspirare, is to breathe together.

Then there is the word spirit itself.

Two old words for breath

The Greek word is pneuma. It means wind and breath, and by extension life. It comes from a verb meaning to blow. In Greek writing it can be the breath in your chest or the wind on a hillside, and the two were not pulled apart as sharply as we pull them apart today.

The Stoic philosophers, who taught in Athens and later in Rome, gave pneuma a larger job. For them it was a kind of breath that runs through things and holds them together as single, living wholes: a tension that moves inward and outward, and gives each thing its qualities and its shape.

The Latin word is spiritus. Its first meanings are air, breath and breathing; later it also came to mean courage, pride, a lively mind and, in the end, spirit. Latin writers used it to translate the Greek pneuma, and English received it by way of French. So when we say that someone has spirit, or that a room has a good spirit, we are using an old word for breath, whether we know it or not. The word inspiration still carries the same picture: a breath taken in.

English keeps the picture in its everyday phrases, too. We catch our breath, hold our breath, breathe a sigh of relief. The verb that gives us expire also gives us the last breath, which is why a person who dies is said to have breathed their last.

The same idea in Chinese

Chinese has a word that does a similar job. Qi (气) means breath, air and vapour, and later the finest stuff that things are made of. It sits inside everyday words: weather (天气), atmosphere (气氛), the colour of a face (气色). The Zhuangzi puts it this way, in our translation: a person’s life is the gathering of breath; when it gathers there is life, and when it scatters there is death.

It would be a stretch to say that these words mean the same thing. They do not. But it is striking that the Greek and Roman tradition on one side, and the Chinese on the other, each going largely its own way, grew their words for the part of us that is more than the body from the same observation: it moves in and out, and when it stops, so do we.

What this has to do with a room

None of this needs to be mysterious. Spirit, in this old sense, is something you can feel in your own chest, twelve to twenty times a minute. It is what the word was made for.

If you take one thing from this, take the practice of using the words literally. For your next three breaths, say silently: in-spire, ex-pire, and then re-spire, breathe again. Notice that, once, these were plain descriptions.