autochthonous
A friend of mine met this word for the first time in a conversation and instantly fell in love with it. Having played around with what we could do with it, adding autochthonousness, autochthonously, and autochthoneity to the possibilities, and devising sentences of mouth-wrenching difficulty, I settled down to look at it more seriously.
The first thing to be said is that autochthonous is not a common word. Its literal meaning is ‘sprung from the earth’ which describes autochthons or Ancient Greek mythological beings who rose straight up from the ground and had no human parents. Chthon is the Greek word for ‘the earth’. Erechtheus, king of Athens, was born from the corn field and given to Athena by his mother Gaia.
From there the word moves to describe the people who first inhabited a region and has the same meaning as indigenous. It is also used in botany to describe plants which are native to a region as opposed to those which are introduced. In the same way it is used in geology to describe rock formations which are still in the area in which they were first formed or deposited. And in medicine it refers to a pathogen which appears locally and is not brought there from a foreign place as by returning travellers.
What seemed to be missing was autochthonous as used in the conversation that my friend engaged in where it appeared to have a legal sense. An autochthonous constitution (as we have in Australia) was the topic. But after seeking advice from that eminent jurist Tony Blackshield I was assured that this was a usage that Michael Kirby had favoured which had not been widely adopted. This was quite possibly a general use of autochthonous to mean ‘from the people, originating locally’ which he had happened to use in a legal context.
From here I have gone back to the Macquarie Dictionary which had all the specialist senses of autochthonous but not the general one. This has been remedied.