What does it mean to "wane philosophical"?
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"To what extent is science a strong-link problem?", Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week, 10/30/2024 [emphasis added]:
Here’s a fascinating and worrying news story in Science: a top US researcher apparently falsified a lot of images (at least) in papers that helped get experimental drugs on the market — papers that were published in top journals for years, and whose problems have only recently become apparent because of amateur sleuthing through PubPeer.
I’m going to wane philosophical for a minute. In general I’m very sympathetic to Adam Mastroianni’s line “don’t worry about the flood of crap that will result if we let everyone publish, publishing is already a flood of crap, but science is a strong-link problem so the good stuff rises to the top”.
The author's discussion of crap publications in top science journals is worth reading and discussing, but this morning let's focus on waning (and waxing) adjectival.
Presumably the author meant to imply that writing about philosophy is a step down from writing about dinosaur fossils, suggesting that "waning philosophical" is a move in the opposite direction from "waxing scientific". He chooses not to use the expected phase "I'm going to wax philosophical" because it would imply (metaphorically) brightening rather than dimming.
In the relevant Wiktionary entry for wax, sense 1 is "to greaten (antonym wane)", and sense 2 is "To increasingly assume the specified characteristic". The connection between waxing philosophical and the idea that philosophical is a good thing seems to be a matter of connotation rather than logical implication, but the quoted writer explicitly cancelled it.
The same thing seems to be going on in this quotation (from a comment on a crossword puzzle site), where the author presupposes that poetic is greater (or brighter) than prosaic:, so that becoming more poetic is waxing but becoming more prosaic is waning:
What's the point of polishing the perfect phrase when you WAX POETIC or even when you WANE PROSAIC if your audience is used to lumping all sorts of similar words together?
This positive waxing-connotation is clear in the choice of adjectives that are most commonly said to be waxing: poetic, lyrical, eloquent, rapsodic, etc. There are a few with less positive associations: nostalgic, indignant. However, the idea of increasing intensity means that there are some positively-evaluated adjectives that are not likely to wax: when someone calms down we don't say that they "waxed calm".
And the positive connotation of waxing adjectival leads to other uses of waning adjectival with a different interpretation, namely that the subject is becoming less adjectival than they once were, where being more adjectival is brighter (and better) and less adjectival is dimmer (and sadder). For examples, see this poem "Waning Lyrical", or the song "Wane Poetic".
Of course all cases of wane adjectival are rare word-play, based on the routine and even banal expression to wax adjectival. Why English elevated wax over wane in this context is not clear to me.
There are some other interesting aspects of the usage history — consider this Google NGram plot:
I don't have time this morning to look for the explanation — perhaps someone in the comments will enlighten us.
[h/t Thomas Shaw]
Jerry Packard said,
November 5, 2024 @ 8:51 am
I think the simplest explanation is the obvious one – simple word play to wax sagacious. Why it was ‘wax’ that was first selected is another question – I suppose it implies addition rather than removal of information.