The New Yorker:

How an Ovid-quoting London broadsheet from the late seventeenth century spawned “Dear Abby,” Dan Savage, and Reddit’s Am I the Asshole.

By Merve Emre

The word “advice” comes from two Latin words: the prefix ad, which implies a movement toward something, and vīsum, “vision,” a distinctly vivid or imaginative image. To ask for advice is to reach for a person whose vision exceeds yours, for reasons supernatural (oracles, mediums), professional (doctors, lawyers), or pastoral (parents, friends). It is a curious accident of language that “advice” contains within it the etymologically unrelated word “vice,” from the Latin vitium, meaning “fault” or “sin.” Yet the accident is suggestive. Alexander Pope seized on it to warn poets away from the royal court in a 1735 satire: “And tho’ the court show vice exceeding clear / None should, by my advice, learn virtue there.” The couplet, contrasting the speaker’s good advice with more nefarious influences, reveals the danger of outsourcing one’s moral vision to others. It may expose the adviser as crude, imperious, or immoral, and leave the advisee shrouded in moral stupidity. Pope’s advice? Beware bad advice from bad people.

Of course, this takes for granted that what the advisee wants is to act virtuously. But what if she only wants the adviser to affirm her vision? Pope, clever man that he was, had a couplet for this occasion, too: “But fix’d before, and well resolv’d was he, / (As men that ask advice are wont to be).” The parentheses are an inspired touch, mimicking how an advisee’s true intentions may be concealed. The advisee who feigns receptivity lays a terrible trap; woe to the adviser who does not think to step around it. Jane Austen, who often took Pope’s advice—he was the “one infallible Pope in the world,” she claimed—choreographed an elegant series of steps around advice-giving in “Sense and Sensibility.” In a discussion with the novel’s protagonist, Elinor Dashwood, the vulgar, manipulative Lucy Steele asks if she should dissolve her secret engagement to Edward Ferrars, knowing full well that Elinor loves him:

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