Arcanum Veritas – the home of ‘sacred secret truthfulness’, obscure trivia, eponymous syndromes and answers to the questions which keep you awake at night.
We shall persist with the structure of inquisition at a structural level to maximise our time-poor readers benefit from ‘click-through’ learning. Answers to those niggling random facts will be highlighted in multimedia form to engage those Gen Y senses…
- Who: Who is, Who was or Who is associated with…
- Crazy Bug Hunters: Doctors, scientists and the risks they take in their search for exotic microbes
- What: What is this? In what way? By what means? or
- Fascinellas: Bacterial oddities and other microbiology trivia
- Where: Where would you find?
- Why: Why is, why has and why should you…
- How: How is? How can? How could one…
- When:
- When all else fails – give it a latin name, TLA or some other equally difficult to remember prolixity
The prospectively and retrospectively snubbed “Five Ws” (and one H) of police interrogation, journalism and general inquisition are most synonymous with Rudyard Kipling. This organizational approach to knowledge interrogation will be used through the arcanum veritas section of this site to assist in refining and defining our knowledge presentation. First the facts, next the proof of the facts, then the consequences of the facts.
I keep six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.
from The Elephant’s Child
Rudyard kipling (1902)
The rhetor Hermagoras of Temnos, as quoted in pseudo-Augustine’s De Rhetorica defined seven “circumstances” (μόρια περιστάσεως ‘elements of circumstance’) as the loci of an issue:
| quis | quid | quando | ubi | cur | quem ad modum | quibus adminiculis |
| who | what | when | where | why | in what way | by what means |
The concept of knowledge and circumstantial organization is not new. Cicero, Quintilian and Julius Victor had a similar concept of circumstances. Gaius Marius Victorinus diagram (4th century) explained Cicero’s system of circumstances in relation to questions:
Boethius made the ‘seven circumstances’ fundamental to the arts of prosecution and defense:
| quis | quid | quomodo | ubi | quando | quibus auxiliis |
| who | what | why | where | when | with what |
These ‘rules of inquisition’ are periodically called into question themselves:
All of you know about — and I hope all of you admit the fallacy of — the doctrine of the five W’s in the first sentence of the newspaper story [Philip F. Griffin 1949]
I keep six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.
I send them over land and sea,
I send them east and west;
But after they have worked for me,
I give them all a rest.
I let them rest from nine till five,
For I am busy then,
As well as breakfast, lunch and tea
For they are hungry men.
But different folk have different views.
I know a person small –
She keeps ten million serving-men,
Who get no rest at all!
She sends ‘em abroad on her own affairs,
From the second she opens her eyes –
One million Hows, two million Wheres
And seven million Whys!
About Mike Cadogan
