The word traces to the medieval Latin verb contrarotulare, a combination of contra (against) and rotulus (wheel or roll). In ancient times, official contracts, laws, regulations, treaties, and decrees, were reified through written documentation stored as cylinders of rolled parchment. Supporting a legal argument or verifying the accuracy of a claim involved comparing statements or assertions “against the rolls.” To control something originally meant that you had access to the documentary means of justifying the exercise of power over that thing: the bill of sale for a slave, for example.
Control is an entirely civilized word. Literacy is a prerequisite—the very idea of control is derived from the magical power civilization assigns to things that have been written down.
The word has grown much since its earliest days. Its application is no longer limited to the realm of bureaucratized power; its broad metaphorical application has made it a word that the civilized simply cannot do without. Control as metaphor is so widespread and commonplace that it is no longer possible to recognize it as metaphor.
We are asked to control our temper, for example. We are told the control of fire was a decisive event in our species’ evolution. But this is metaphor. No one really has power over fire—whether we are talking about an emotional flame or one that burns skin, not the kind of power that commands the labor of another person, not the kind of power that seals a man in prison, not the kind of power that empties the ocean of fish and the forest of trees.
Control—real control, not its metaphorical cousin—still requires documentary means of justification. An Achilles heel here, I think: remove the words, and you remove the power. Burn the rolls, and the magic becomes mere ashes.
