Errant Epistemology

I esteem episteme, which is the common Greek for knowledge.

I must have heard it, sure enough, when I attended college.

But another problem rises when I encounter and behold

Epistemology—a word I’ve met with times untold

While stirring arcane pools of mud with my rather shortish stick.

It sounds like water dripping over gravel on the double-quick,

An admirable sound it is, but yet I do tend to forget

The meaning of this Greekish modern manufactured sobriquet.

It dates to 1865, coined by a Scot philosopher,

Fond of strange Friedrich Hegel he, by name James Ferrier.

So here’s a word amalgamated from broken bits and shards

Not some gem discovered in the works of dead Hellenic bards.

In English it means “theory of knowledge” pure and simple

Instead I garble up the letters of its starting, stylish dimple

And mistake it for a variant of Etymology.

Not so. It is my bad. Alas our wisdom bristles with -logies.

What does that ending mean? It means “discourse,” blah, blah, mere learned talk.

It is the sounds that issue as the learned hold forth on their walk

About. It occurred that if I wrote my own -logy I might remember

The sense of epistemology when it comes around—the next December.

But do not bet on it.