Idiom
tabula rasa
Academic Roman origin
Meaning
A blank slate — a mind or a situation with nothing yet written on it.
Examples
“New city, new job — a tabula rasa.”
“The design team asked for a tabula rasa and got one: no brand guidelines, no existing users, no legacy anything.”
“Every incoming administration promises to treat the department as a tabula rasa, and every one of them discovers within a month that the contracts, the pensions and the buildings were all signed for by somebody else.”
Examples
simple
“New city, new job — a tabula rasa.”
contextual
“The design team asked for a tabula rasa and got one: no brand guidelines, no existing users, no legacy anything.”
complex
“Every incoming administration promises to treat the department as a tabula rasa, and every one of them discovers within a month that the contracts, the pensions and the buildings were all signed for by somebody else.”
Origin
Romans did their everyday writing on wooden tablets coated with wax, scratching letters with the pointed end of a stylus. The other end of the stylus was a flat blade, and drawing it across the wax smoothed everything away. A tabula rasa is that tablet after the blade: scraped clean, ready to be used again.
Aristotle had already used the image of an unwritten tablet for the mind at birth, and medieval philosophers working in Latin gave it this name. It became famous in 1689, when John Locke argued that there are no innate ideas and that everything in the mind arrives through experience — a position that has carried the tabula rasa label ever since, and has been argued about continuously since.
English uses it for a genuinely fresh start: a new government with no commitments, a rebuilt system with no legacy code, a person arriving somewhere nobody knows them.
Stories
The Poets' Latin · See all Roman origin
Horace, Virgil and Cicero, still quoted in the original.
carpe diem — Seize the day — make use of today rather than counting on tomorrow.
tempus fugit — Time flies — said when far more of it has gone than you expected.
memento mori — A reminder that you are going to die, and that this should change how you spend the time.
in vino veritas — People say what they actually think once they have had a drink.
festina lente — Make haste slowly — move quickly, but never faster than you can do it properly.
to err is human — Making mistakes is part of being a person, so a mistake alone is not a scandal.
- Level
- C2 · Proficiency
- Updated