The noun νους (nous) means mind, the conscious and reasonable faculty of a person. The crucial difference between Hebrew thought and Greek thought is that the Greeks were obsessed with demarcating and separating categories and faculties, whereas to the Hebrews there was only oneness, and if there were certain faculties, then these were always integrated into the whole dynamic oneness, where they interacted and flowed into each other like earth, water and sky and were never truly separated.

The philosopher Plato divided the soul into νους (nous), the intellect, θυμοσ (thumos), one's nobler passions and excitement, and επιθυμια (epithumia), one's baser lusts and desires. Attentive readers of the Torah, of course, would have immediately recognized these three as Noah's three sons Shem, Japheth and Ham. And students of Greek myth would recognize Bellerophon of Corinth on Pegasus the winged horse who slayed the monstrous Chimera. In later times, Bellerophon would morph into saint George (γεωργος, georgos, earth-worker, a.k.a. Adam), on his horse (ιππος, hippos), killing the dragon (δρακων, drakon). Another version of this same story has the Roman soldier Longinus (λογχη, logche, spearman, a.k.a. Cain) thrust his lance into Jesus' side (πλευρα, pleura, side, entering his κοιλια, koilia, or seat of emotions).

By the first century CE, the mind was also divided up, with the word λογος (logos) referring to the mind's most glorified subset, namely the pure emotionless rationality or hard algorithmic intellect (like mental software running the perfect law of liberty: James 1:25). Aristotle had declared that the Logos ruled supreme and that by purifying one's rationality, one would unlock all the mysteries of the universe. It took secular humanity until the early 1900 (when Russel formalized his paradox, Gödel his Incompleteness Theorems and Turing the Halting Problem) to realize that this was patently and embarrassingly incorrect, and that rationality indeed had a boundary, and that the mind not only started before there were words but also went on after words failed. The evangelists, of course, had long preached that although the Logos is also that which manifests the laws of physics in nature (which is necessary for nature to function and even to begin to emerge from the singularity), there are certain things the Logos cannot do, which is why rationality must die, and resurrect as something beyond it (Ephesians 3:19, Philippians 4:7), so that although the Logos' teachings would be more than all the world's books contained (John 21:25), not the Logos but rather the Spirit teaches man truly everything about everything (John 14:26, 1 Corinthians 2:10).

It's officially unclear where our noun νους (nous) comes from, also because it doesn't seem to occur in cognate languages. This would mean that the Greeks had their own word for mind, which is not unthinkable, but also that they named the mind after something with which its kinship is so counterintuitive to us moderns that we are no longer able to retrace the ancient logic and arrive, with the ancient Greeks, at the source. In a living language (particularly in a time when there were no dictionaries, standards and committees), words are formed according to the shared enthusiasm for that word by every user of that language. Since the mind occupied a great portion of Greek thought, the word by which it was known must have seemed spot-on by everybody involved, and this ultimately demonstrates that we have no real idea what the ancient Greek were talking about when they used our noun νους (nous).

Some modern scholars suppose that our noun derives from the verb νεω (neo), to spin (see below), probably also because Greek mythology explained life as being "spun" by Clotho (in Latin known as Nona, which is not dissimilar to our noun), one of the three Fates. This verb itself is a specialization of the verb ναιω (naio), to flow or overflow, from which in turn come the nouns ναος (naos), temple, ναυς (naus), ship, and of course the familiar adjective νεος (neos), new and young. Moreover, our English words "text", "textile" and "technology" all derive from the same ancient Proto-Indo-European root meaning "to weave" as the Greek noun τεκτων (tekton), meaning assembler: the profession of both Jesus and Joseph. Subsequently, Clotho was also credited with giving the alphabet to humanity.

The problem with all this is that, even in Greek thought, the sovereignty of the mind is difficult to reconcile with the supremacy of the Fates. And a second problem comes with the obvious Proto-Indo-European pedigree of the other words with which the Greeks contemplated man's cognitive and reasonable faculties: the verb γινωσκω (ginosko), to know, comes from the PIE root "gno-", to know; the noun ψυχη (psuche), mind or soul, comes from the PIE root "bhes-", to breathe (in); the noun πνευμα (pneuma), spirit, comes from the PIE root "pneu-", to breathe (out). All this suggests that Greek contemplation on cognition was a continuation of a more ancient PIE tradition, in precisely the same way that our Western philosophy of reason is based on the Greek tradition.

All these things considered makes us here at Abarim Publications privately suspect that our noun νους (nous) may have been rooted in the Proto-Indo-European root "nas-" from which comes our English word "nose". Unlike the spinning Greek Clotho, the God of the Hebrews gave life to Adam by breathing it into his nose (Genesis 2:7). And not only the English word for nose stems from this root, also the Sanskrit, Persian, Latin and thus all European and Slavic languages. The only odd one out is Greek, which has ρις (ris) for nose, hence the familiar element "rhino-". Where this word ρις (ris) in turn comes from isn't clear either (but perhaps from αιρω, airo, to lift up, hence our word "air"?).

For most of our human existence we had no speech and all that time human vocalization wasn't much different from animal vocalization. That means we had no nominal, categorical and thus logical reason (see our article on the noun ονομα, onoma, meaning name or noun). And the ability to quickly tell the difference between an animal and a fellow human was crucial during an encounter in the wild but also when humans were trying to compose a dynamic but coherent society out of fellow humans plus their many animals. Certain things could be expected from fellow humans, even when there was no language yet, while those same things could not be asked from animals. But how to tell the difference? Humans were bipedal, but so were birds. And certain animals like bears would routinely stand on their hind legs, just like humans. And of course all the members of the family of the great apes had most physical features in common with humans, including the celebrated opposable thumb. Only humans have buttocks (hence the name Seth) but fur and clothing hide them, and buttocks point the wrong way when creatures face each other. And that means that really the only true way to tell a reasonable human from unreasonable animal was by the nose.

Only humans have a so-called pyramid nose that protrudes from their faces. Why our human nose evolved that way (or why God gave humans such a distinct nose) is still not clear to science but the leading hypotheses whittle it down to (a) a specialization in olfactory navigation (our nose apparently helps with foraging but also with cooking), and (b) advancing social intelligence in which the nose greatly increased the range of people's facial expressions and their ability to express affection, disapproval and other feelings, as a kind of proto-speech.

Also, as we explore in our article on the noun ους (ous), meaning ear, the human face is uniquely featured to turn wholly, as a kind of sensory array, to whatever sound peeks our interest. In highly dynamic situations (say, a hunt or a fight or a party), our noses literally point toward the action, which certainly gives a brief tactical advantage to our observant fellow hunters, fighters or partiers. Protruding noses point toward objects of interest. And that surely helped parents read their infants' direct intentions, leaders assess their subjects' attention, and even prospective females gauge for an attentive mate.

The Hebrew word for nose or nostril, as used in Genesis 2:7, is אף ('ap), from the verb אנף ('anep), meaning anger or dissatisfaction. The noun נחר (nahar) describes the vigorous snorting of a horse, and probably has to do with the root חרר (harar), which describes a society's central and enclosed source of heat. The name of the grandfather of Abraham — who was not simply the father of the faithful but rather the father of international trade — namely Nahor, comes from this noun.

Glowing with Enlightenment, man began to generously refer to himself as Homo sapiens (coined in 1758), which means "man with taste", after the Latin verb sapio, to taste, which not only implies mere discernment but also enjoyment and specifically man's ever quest for pleasure, and of course refinery, as man clearly felt right to name himself after his most exquisite tastes. But now it appears that ancient and wordless man may have regarded himself as Homo nasus, or "man with nose" to distinguish himself from creatures without a pyramid nose and thus without the faculty of reason.

Curious enough, in the 17th century, the English language yielded the word "nosy" in the sense of having a prominent nose, but in the 19th century grafted upon it the anatomically inexplicable quality of inquisitiveness, and even left us with the phrase Nosy Parker of equally obscure pedigree. The other archetypal nose of that same era was that of Pinocchio (1883), whose nose grew, and thus became nosier as he lied (this appears to also tie into the similarity between the word ελεφας, elephas, elephant, and the verb ελεφαιρομαι, elephairomai, to deceive).

We moderns may like to take our private mind for naturally granted, but there's nothing natural about it, and neither is it private. Our mind is a collective thing, not an individual thing, which is why we need formal systems of logic instead of just great ideas. Formal, in this sense, means to have form, to have a standardized form that everybody can recognize. Formality is the reason why, say, the letter A can be recognized by everybody, no matter in what font it comes. The font allows creative freedom within the formal qualities that define the letter A. Without formalities there can neither be shared understanding nor private understanding, which means that formalities are what separate man from beast. It also means that man is a collective thing; a sole human is an animal (Psalm 73:22, Ecclesiastes 3:18, 2 Peter 2:12, Jude 1:10).

The human mind was born a wilderness and over the timeless ages, mankind tamed it and cultivated it, sowed into it the seeds of symbolism, contemplated the very nature of thought and distilled the essence from its own world of artistic expression until the bare alphabet came like powdered thought to the surface. Man took plants and made paper (βιβλος, biblos), created a world based on trade and created temples devoted to synthetic thought and knowledge (starting with the temple of YHWH in Jerusalem). The in itself wildly radical and unnatural idea of a day-off became the Sabbath, which forced people to count their days in sevens, which nothing in the whole of the universe naturally did. Days, months, years and Great Years are all natural cosmological phenomena but the week is artificial. Moses prayed: "Teach us the number of our days, that we may present to Thee a heart of wisdom" (Psalm 90:12), which has always been explained to refer to a person's productive life, but no, it refers to the calendar, to a kind of planning independent from the cycles of nature. It was followed by other synthetic orders, regularities and administrations; pillars of modern societies.

All throughout history, the People of the Nose were known to — how shall we put it? — routinely fail the Turing test. They could tell you how the universe works but not who might be interested in that. They were clumsy in whatever social code counted as proper that day, as they probed on toward a brave new world with a clock at its heart; a mechanism like divine DNA that never failed, was perfectly predictable and ultimately impartially just.

The story of the little mechanical boy named Pinocchio comes from a time when Romanticism had oozed over into Transcendentalism, when intellectual rigor had once again made way to emotional speculation and the quest for woodland elves and dead people's spirits. Romanticism had called for nationalism, for naturism, for a counter-scientific movement that ultimately resulted in the utterly dark revival of Roman-styled National Socialism. The negative ring of the word nosy and the derogative term Nosy Parker (= an itinerant person with a big nose who parks somewhere; to park, in this sense, was coined in 1844) are deeply counter-noetic and ultimately natural and bestial. The story of Pinocchio, instead, was deeply sensitive to the spirit of its age.

The noun νους (nous) describes the intellectual mind: the artificial cognitive processes in our brain that allow us to make a synthetic world, which is separate from the natural world and the natural cycles to which the whole rest of the biosphere is subjected. It's the counterpart of the emotional intuition that humanity shares with the natural animals, and the two relate precisely in the same way as water (emotions) relate to dry land (reason) with first agriculture (spoken language and visual art) and then cities made from synthetic bricks and metals and such (written language, systems of formal logic such as mathematics and the Scientific Method, and ultimately computer code).

Our noun is used 24 times in the New Testament and always in the singular form, never plural: see full concordance. From this noun derive:

The verb νηθω (netho) means to spin (Matthew 6:28 and Luke 12:27 only) and derives via the unused form νησω (neso), from the likewise unused verb νεω (neo), to spin (this -o to -so to -tho transition is not uncommon in Greek). This verb stems from the same Proto-Indo-European root "(s)neh-", to spin, as the English words neuro, needle and sinew.

Spinning is the art of making yarn out of fleece, and necessarily precedes weaving. As noted above, the words textile and text are related, and the idea of "spinning a yarn" in the narrative sense appears to be an ancient invention that's baked into the European languages.

Our verb νεω (neo), to spin, is one of four identical words, whose four different etymologies may or may not have influenced each other. If so, then these words were formed according to some innate understanding of Greek speakers that these four different things were actually the same thing. If not, then these four identical words became identical entirely by accident (like the English words trunk, trunk and trunk). Still, regardless of how these words were formed, any creative poet may have had a run with these similarities. Whether the authors of the gospels were such creative poets can't be proven in any critical sense, but here at Abarim Publications, we suspect they were. But even if they weren't, any creative reader is entirely free to recognize anything consistent in anything observed, so a consideration of these four words is not without merit:

• Verb νεω (neo, 2) means to swim or float. It is thought to derive from ναιω (naio), to flow or overflow, from which come the nouns ναος (naos), temple, and ναυς (naus), ship. Some linguists also derive the noun νους (nous), meaning mind, from this cluster of words, but although this assumption is fairly reasonable, it also comes with a few problems. See above for a further discussion of this. Another important word that may relate to our verb is νησος (nesos), island, after which the Nostoi or Journey-Home literary genre was named: most famously the Odyssey but also the final few chapters of the Book of Acts.
• Verb νεω (neo, 3) means to heap or pile up. This verb is formally of unknown pedigree but here at Abarim Publications we would observe that the act of spinning turns a heap of wool into a heap of yarn, whereas heaps of treasures and wisdom were stored in ships and temples.
• The word νεω (neo, 4) occurs only in the term εσ νεω (es neo), meaning "next year", which is commonly explained to be a contraction of εις (eis) meaning in, to or toward, νεος (neos), new, and ετος (etos), year. Why the term "next year" requires to be contracted isn't explained, nor why it would contract into a form that is identical to a description of floating (the familiar term panta rhei, everything flows, comes to mind), heaping up and spinning. But note that the noun ετος (etos), year, is identical to the adjective ετος (etos), true or genuine.

Also note the similarity with the particle of strong affirmation νη (ne).