The Word Family

Sophia was a shipwright's word. Before she meant wisdom she meant competence, and her children went into ideas instead.

One took paying clients and has not been invited to dinner since 380 BC. One has been in graduate school for two thousand four hundred years. One went into the wine trade, was caught watering the stock, and somehow ended up meaning expensive.

Seven families of words gather for a dinner, an auction, a christening, an inquiry, a crossing, a harvest and an oath. Each began close to something an ordinary person simply did. Each has spent the centuries since building an apparatus so that the act could travel farther than the person who performed it, and each mislaid something on the way.

Underneath the comedy is a question about how anyone knows whom to trust, and what happens to expertise, assurance, credit, authority, governance, intelligence and testimony once they are compressed into things that can be filed, signed and relied upon by strangers who were never there.

Two parts: seven stories, then seven essays. The stories stand alone. The essays explain why the joke keeps landing in the same place.

Onosoji O. Ononuga is a programme assurance and technology leader with more than 23 years’ experience in software testing, quality, risk and complex programme delivery. He works across AI governance, intelligence sovereignty, institutional capability and evidence-led assurance, with a particular interest in how organisations know when systems, claims and decisions can be trusted. He is the founder of Cereark Quality, Risk & Assurance Consortium and has led assurance work across major public and private-sector programmes in the UK and internationally.