the.com/goodness
the quiet rebellion of doing right when nobody's watching and nothing's owed
means The quality of being morally good, kind, or virtuous — and also, more casually, the wholesome or beneficial part of a thing, as in the goodness of fresh bread.
from Pure English plumbing: the adjective 'good' (Old English 'gōd', a word so old it threads back through the Germanic languages) plus the suffix '-ness', which turns a quality into a thing you can name. So 'goodness' is literally 'the state of being good.' That same instinct gave us the exclamation 'goodness!' and 'goodness gracious' — these began as polite dodges, soft substitutes for swearing by God, so a startled person could call on goodness instead of taking a holier name in vain.
- old root
- From Old English god, unrelated to deity, meaning fit or useful
- gracious goodness
- Once a polite swap for swearing by God's name
- helper's high
- Kindness triggers oxytocin and dopamine, a measurable brain reward
- contagious
- Witnessing good deeds inspires onlookers to do their own
- the goods
- Same root branched into groceries, cargo, and stolen loot
mother teresa — albanian nun who worked with the poor in calcutta, india for 45 years and won the nobel peace prize in 1979
mandela's forgiveness — nelson mandela pardoned his apartheid jailers after 27 years in prison, south africa 1994
raoul wallenberg — swedish diplomat who saved approximately 100,000 hungarian jews during the holocaust, budapest 1944-1945