I am reading Philip Ball's book Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything. It claims that curious comes from the Latin cura, to care and that earlier uses of the word included working "with diligence and caution."
I have a conjecture based on this -- one would not be at all surprised is completely wrong -- that as curious take up the usage we currently see it used that the word "care" came in to fill that vacuum.
I would like this to be true because I have always been a bit confused by the etymology of care, which comes from the old English for sorrow, whereas the was we use the word is important to the way a real artist works. Using the word care the way we do, it is safe to say that when we look at an artifact we evaluate it by how much care we believe was put into it. We don't mean sorrow here; we mean something like one of the archaic uses of curiosity. And we very much need to a word with that meaning, especially those of us who see art as our salvation from the the void.
