Several decades ago, in a community far away from our beloved Door County, I once was involved in raising money to renovate a local neighborhood center. I was giving a tour to one of that community’s great philanthropists when an old woman came up to me, stuffed a pledge envelope in my hand, then hurried away almost as if she was embarrassed. I knew the woman because she led story-time and read books to groups of young children (including a few of mine) who would gather around her on the floor. She was part of a federal government program that provided a stipend to senior citizens who volunteer in an effort to keep them out of poverty.
If my story was from a Hollywood movie, the old woman’s pledge envelope would have contained a commitment for a million dollars. Instead, it held a twenty-dollar bill.
Eventually we raised the money necessary to renovate the neighborhood center and the great philanthropist I walked through the building provided the single most important gift that made everything possible. Yet as a percentage of their respective wealth, that old woman’s gift of $20 was probably a far greater financial sacrifice. It’s been decades since that campaign, but I still often wonder which of these donors was the greater philanthropist.
This story came to mind recently when writing my last column about the philanthropy of MacKenzie Scott. As a reminder, Ms. Scott is a co-founder of Amazon and has been in the news recently for having donated an incredible $12 billion to charity. When announcing yet another round of her remarkable gifts on December 8, 2021, she wrote on her blog about the concept of semantic narrowing.
To linguists, semantic narrowing is when the meaning of a word becomes less general or inclusive than its earlier definition. For instance, centuries ago, an “undertaker” was anyone paid by another person to undertake any task as assigned. Today, an undertaker is one who undertakes the very specific task of preparing a body for a funeral. Similarly, hundreds of years ago, “deer” referred to any kind of four-legged animal that walked the earth. Today, a deer is a very specific type of four-legged animal of the taxonomic family Cervidae.
Ms. Scott wrote of her discomfort being referred to as a philanthropist. “A lifetime of cultural references associated [the word ‘philanthropist’] with financially wealthy people who believed they knew best how to solve other people’s problems,” writes Ms. Scott. “Since I did not believe myself to be such a person, I had always felt more kinship with people who offered a couch when someone said they needed a couch.”
Yet she was surprised to learn that the dictionary definition of the word was far simpler and more beautiful than she ever realized. Merriam-Website defines a philanthropist as “one who makes an active effort to promote human welfare.” It defines philanthropy as “goodwill to fellow members of the human race.” Nowhere in those definitions is a requirement that the person make billion-dollar contributions.
Consider the etymology of the word philanthropy. A 15th century definition of philanthropy is a “love of humankind, especially as evinced in deeds of practical beneficence and work for the good of others.” That concept is almost lyrical in its beauty.
In most cases of semantic narrowing, there is no diminishment of the word, only greater specificity as to what the word comes to mean in a modern context. A “deer” is no longer what we call all four-legged animals, it now refers only to a specific type of four-legged animal. Yet as we have begun to narrow the definition of the word “philanthropy,” we are losing the most extraordinary and magical aspects of it.
“The problem is that half the beauty of the original meaning of ‘philanthropy’ was in its breadth,” writes Ms. Scott. “It’s as if we had taken the word ‘love’ and reduced it to only mean familial love, or only romantic love, cutting out the love we feel for friends, or food, or sunsets, or strangers.”
Goodness knows that our world needs the remarkable generosity of billionaires like Ms. Scott if we are to overcome our most intractable problems. But when we narrow the meaning of the word philanthropy so that only the wealthiest among us can be considered philanthropists, we are diminishing that very thing which makes philanthropic giving so beautiful.
“How much or how little money changes hands doesn’t make it philanthropy,” writes Ms. Scott, “Intention and effort make it philanthropy.”
This column by Bret Bicoy originally appeared in the Peninsula Pulse on June 3, 2022.
Bicoy Philanthropic Advisors 