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I’m in a lively mood this evening for our Word of the Week, fit for the temporal season of spring for us in the northern hemisphere, and for the church’s season too, Eastertide, and for my favorite game right at the beginning of its long and lazy season, baseball. Spring’s in the air, and so is the English language!

English has more words than any other language in the world, and shades of meaning that we who are native speakers never give a thought to, but they sure must baffle people who try to learn the difference between two words that seem to mean exactly the same thing, yet you can’t use them interchangeably! Don’t doubt me on this. Just consider these two sentences:

John is the biggest man on the committee.
John is the largest man on the committee.

The first sentence means that John is really important. The second means that John weighs 250 pounds. This wealth of words — and how tricky it is to use them right — struck me with special force when I was in Italy, and one of my cousin Peppino’s little boys got dirt on his hands while his father was tending to his terraced gardens on the mountainside. Peppino saw it and complained about the “squallore,” and I smiled to myself — we also have that word, but we don’t use it for a kid playing in the dirt!

That trickiness extends also to forms of words. Think of these two sentences:

“I walked down to the old house, and there she was, hollering at the mailman.”
“So I walked down to the old house, and there she was as ever, a-hollerin’ at the mailman.”

There’s a certain rustic and old-fashioned air to the second sentence, lending it a touch of comedy that you don’t find in the first. There’s also a sense that the hollerin’ has gone on for some time. It’s one thing to holler, and another to be a-hollering. So too it is one thing to be live, as an electric wire, or a loose baseball in the middle of a play, but another to be alive — and you can’t even use them in the same way in a sentence. We say, “That fire is live,” or “That fire is alive,” but though we can talk about a live fire, we can’t talk about an alive fire. At this point, everybody trying to learn English throws his book and his pencil up in the air and cries out, “Who can understand this thing?”

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First, though, a word or two about life. And why not bring up one of those cases in which English does not have separate words for two things that are similar in one way but really not at all the same? When the Greek Bible describes the living God, or Christ risen from the dead, the adjective for live or living is ζῶν, zon with a long o, and means a lot more than that you are eating and drinking, or that you have a story to tell about what you’ve seen and done, your bios. Don’t we also have the same sense? You can be going to sleep at night and getting up every morning, but still be dead inside: you’ve got the bios, but not the zoe. Poor Ted Williams, maybe the greatest pure hitter in baseball history, ordered his body to be frozen after he died, hoping that someday it might be revived. He had only bios in his mind, not zoe, the very life of life; not much to hope for, I think. We long for a share in the life of God — not in the life of a slug or a toad, not to say that that isn’t fit for those critters. But we are made for more.

Now, on that difference between live and alive: the a- prefix in this case is a shortening of an unstressed preposition, on. The Old English noun was lif, pronounced leef; and someone alive was on life, pronounced on leeve-a, with the -e ending for the dative case after that preposition. In Old English, the consonant f was voiced between vowels, and that’s why we say the adjective as live (the consonant v entered our alphabet only after the Norman French brought it with them, because in French, f and v could distinguish very different words, as they came to do in English also). Anyway, a-hollerin’ means, so to speak, on hollering, or in the middle of hollering; like a-hootin’ and a-hoppin’ and so forth. You may think this is all much ado about nothing, but there’s the on- again shortened to a-, so that Old English on donne, to be done, to be doing, becomes a-do, as in to-do, as away means on the way, and aside means on the side.

And on that warm and sunny afternoon on the way to Emmaus, the two disciples took Jesus aside and begged him to abide with them a spell, to have supper at the inn. And only when he broke the bread did their eyes open.

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Our readers will likely already know where today’s entry for our Word of the Week comes from. My family and I heard it yesterday in the gospel, which was John’s account of the incident with Thomas. The other apostles had seen the risen Lord, but Thomas wasn’t with them at the time. He was stubborn. He did not give them credence. He had to see the marks in Jesus’ hands and feet, to touch them, even to put his hand into the wound in Jesus’ side. That’s what he said. Maybe we can say that Thomas is the patron saint of brave and stalwart pessimists, like C. S. Lewis’s Puddleglum of happy memory. For the same Thomas, when Jesus told the apostles that he was going to Jerusalem, said, “Let us go too, so we may die with him.” But when Thomas does see the risen Lord and does touch his wounds, his affirmation knows no bounds. There is nothing timid about what he says then, no dithering, no pondering, no doubt. “My Lord and my God!” he cries.

Thomas, you’ll also remember, was so called because he was a twin: the word is taom in Hebrew, and John, to help out his Greek readers, says that it’s equivalent to the name Didymos, which also means twin. I don’t know whether Taom ever served as a proper name in Hebrew, rather than a nickname, but it does appear that you might well meet a Didymos in the Greek world. Many words for twin that I know of have to do with there being two: along with the Greek didymos, there’s English twin, and German Zwilling (think of their number zwei: a Zwilling is a Two-ling, just as a triplet is a Drilling, a Three-ling). But Hebrew taom doesn’t have to do with the number two. It’s related instead to a root suggesting completion: as boards that are coupled together to make up something whole.

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Now then, does the number two have anything to do with doubting? Yes, quite a lot, as it turns out. We say we are “of two minds” about something, when we are wavering between yes and no. We can find that sense in Greek. When Jesus appeared before the apostles and the crowds at Bethany that final time, we are told that “some doubted,” Greek edistasan, from the verb distazein, suggesting that you are standing between two alternatives, wavering, hesitating. That doesn’t mean that they persisted in their hesitation. It’s one of the normal human reactions when we’re confronted with something utterly new to us, foreign, wondrous, impossible to file away in our usual categories. We find the same sense in German Zweifel, doubt — you are teetering this way and that way. So also in Latin dubitare, a verb built from the noun dubium, doubt, and if you give it the “frequentative” sense suggested by the suffix -ito, teetering or wavering is the way to look at it.

So the English word dubious in its old sense did not suggest something that probably was not true. It suggested that teetering, as you get when nearly equal weights are placed in each scale of the balance. When Milton’s Satan boasts that he opposed the power of God “in dubious battle on the plains of Heaven,” he is telling a flat-out lie. There was nothing dubious about it. The bad angels have their clocks cleaned by the good angels on each of the first two days, and on the third day the Son of God alone, unassisted, overwhelms them utterly at the first charge: it is as infinity against nothing.

Our word doubt, like the similar but unrelated word debt, came into English with William and his Norman conquerors. Doubt replaced the Old English word tweogan, meaning, as you may guess, being puzzled by two contrary choices, as if you were your own twin. By the time the words doubt and debt entered our language, the b in the Latin word had been lost in French before the t, so that in Chaucer you will see the words written as doute and dette. In fact, the b was never pronounced in English doubt and debt, and wasn’t even written in those words until around 1450 or so, when English scribes inserted it to bring the words closer in appearance to their Latin ancestors. Alas for schoolchildren everywhere! But the b does help to show the kinship between doubt and indubitable, and between debt and debit.

But let there be no doubt about it, since Thomas certainly didn’t hang on to any. As we say at Easter, “Christ is risen, He is risen indeed.”

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A happy and glorious Easter to all our readers and to your families!

And it’s no surprise that our Word of the Week should have to do with the blessed season of Eastertide. I’ve chosen the word glory, not because we know a great deal about that word and its origins and its kin — in fact we don’t. It comes to us, through the French, from Latin gloria, and we’re not sure where that comes from. Rather, I’ve chosen it because it seems that every language manages to shed light on some one or two features of glory, but not on all of the features, as if no human means could do justice to the thing itself.

So then let’s start from the Hebrew word for it, chabod, meaning “abundance, honor, glory.” “May the glory of the Lord endure forever,” sings David in the psalm,

who looks on the earth and it trembles,
who touches the mountains and they smoke!

There we see the glory of the Lord in power, such power as must shake man to the depths of his soul. “In the morning you shall see the glory of the Lord,” says Moses to the children of Israel, whom God has set free from their bondage in Egypt, but it isn’t a light-hearted and pleasant thing. For they have been grumbling against Moses, which means they have been grumbling against God, because they need food, and some of them want to go back to the stew-pots of Egypt. God is going to send them the bread of heaven, the manna — and “manna” itself is an ironical name, since it means, “What’s this?”, which is what the people said when they first saw it. But to be near the glory of God, for them, is like being in the shadow of a mountain when it trembles.

And that’s exactly right, since chabod comes from the root verb cabed, “to be heavy, to have weight.” That could be said of the burden on your back, or the troubles you must endure, as when the vindictive Pharaoh lays “heavier work on the men” he has made into slaves. But it is also often said of the divine. So Manoah, Samson’s father-to-be, uses an intensive form of the verb when he says to the angel, “What is your name, so that, when your words come true, we may honor you?” — meaning, “that we may heap you with all the weight of glory.” C. S. Lewis was careful to note the sense of the Hebrew here, and that’s why he called his book of essays The Weight of Glory.

But the Greek word doxa, the word for glory in the New Testament, doesn’t carry those associations. Instead it suggests high repute, praise: a participial form of the word is what you get in the Greek Psalms, for “Glorious things of thee are spoken, City of God!” So when Saint Paul says that we’re to eat and drink and do all that we do “for the glory of God,” that’s the word he uses, and he means by it that our deeds are to become works of praise. That sense of the word is also present in Latin gloria. Now, in Latin the adjective gloriosus wasn’t always meant in praise: one of the stock characters in Roman comedy was the “miles gloriosus,” meaning “the soldier who’s always bragging about himself,” and often for feats in battle which he never actually performed. I think the idea is that glory in this sense, like praise, is something that others bestow upon you, and not what you deck yourself in to show off.

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Now that sense, oddly enough, brings me to one of my favorite words in Welsh, gogoniant, which means “glory,” and that’s what you’ll see in the Welsh Bible, but it comes from gogawn, which has two main features to it. If it’s a noun, it suggests the kind of glory you sing about; as an adjective, it suggests that you are manly and strong. Of course you would apply it to Jesus, who triumphed over man’s mightiest foes, sin and death.

Yet there’s still one really important association I haven’t touched upon, and for this one we go to English — but Old English, before the word from French replaced our older Germanic word, which was wuldor. Isn’t that a fine word? Caedmon, the illiterate cowherd turned sacred poet, in the first hymn he ever composed, called this whole world the “weorc Wuldorfaeder,” the “work of the Glory-Father,” and he meant us to look up and behold it in all its splendor. That’s what wuldor suggests: radiance, light, splendor, beauty, wonder. It is something to see, to behold, so we shouldn’t be surprised to find that it’s a cousin of Latin vultus, the face, the countenance. And that may be the most glorious thing of all that we can say about our God, who says to us, in the psalm, “Seek my face.”

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Out of the bosom of eternal bliss
In which he reigned with his glorious Sire,
He down descended, like a most demiss
And abject thrall, in flesh's frail attire,
That he for man might pay sin's deadly hire,
And him restore unto that happy state
In which he stood before his hapless fate.

In flesh at first the guilt committed was,
Therefore in flesh it must be satisfied:
Nor spirit, nor angel, though they man surpass,
Could make amends to God for man's disguide,
But only man himself, who self did slide.
So taking flesh of virgin's sacred womb,
For man's dear sake he did a man become.

And that most blessed body, which was born
Without all blemish or reproachful blame,
He freely gave to be both rent and torn
Of cruel hands, who with despiteful shame
Reviling him, that them most vile became,
At length him nailed on a gallow tree,
And slew the just by most unjust decree.

O huge and most unspeakable impression
Of love's deep wound, that pierced the piteous heart
Of that dear Lord with so entire affection,
And sharply launching every inner part,
Dolors of death into his soul did dart,
Doing him die, that never it deserved,
To free his foes that from his hest had swerved.

What heart can feel least touch of so sore launch,
Or thought can think the depth of so dear wound?
Whose bleeding source their streams yet never staunch
But still do flow, and freshly still redound
To heal the sores of sinful souls unsound,
And cleanse the guilt of that infected crime
Which was enrooted in all fleshly slime.

O blessed well of love, O flower of grace,
O glorious Morning star, O lamp of light,
Most lively image of thy Father's face,
Eternal King of glory, Lord of might,
Meek Lamb of God before all worlds behight,
How can we thee requite for all this good?
Or what can prize that thy most precious blood?

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On to the second word. “One of you will betray me,” says Jesus to his twelve closest friends, the apostles, at the Last Supper. Imagine the astonishment and the dismay. No one of them said, “That’s not true. We will all be faithful.” What Jesus said, they believed. They were dismayed because they knew that some one among them would in fact do that, though they could not imagine who or why. Or rather, the eleven innocent could not imagine who or why. Judas, who had already met the chief priests in secret, knew who it was, and why he did it, we can only guess.

Now, the word we translate as betray is the Greek verb paradidomi, which literally means to hand over, as when you hand or give somebody over to the police, or to the man’s enemies. In Latin, the prefix is different but the root verb is the same: tradere, to give-across: imagine that you are delivering up someone from one end of a bridge to the armies at the other end. From the Latin agent noun traditor, someone who hands over, we get, through the Norman French, our word traitor. And that, of course, is what Judas was. But there’s an odd thing about both the Greek verb and the Latin verb. Suppose you want to describe the teachings of someone who was the exact opposite of Judas: someone who faithfully handed over what he had learned from Jesus, the words, the teachings, and the actions of the Master. You would use that same verb in Greek, or that same word in Latin! The Latin verbal noun gets to the heart of the action: traditio, meaning tradition. Lest this be only a curious example of a word that seems to mean two opposite things, let me note something that happens in both uses. When Judas betrayed Jesus, he treated him simultaneously as someone worthless, fit to be executed, and of great value (thirty pieces of silver, I guess): nobody betrays a coward, because there’s nothing worth the betrayal. But when Saint Paul says, “I hand on to you what was handed on to me,” using that same Greek verb, he’s implying that he, Paul, is of no value, except insofar as he passes along, faithfully, what the Lord directly or through the apostles has given to him, because it’s that which is priceless. And he would die rather than betray the faith. He empties himself to be filled with Christ.

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The final word I’ll look at is the Greek lestes, usually translated as thief, but sometimes as insurrectionist. Which is it? Well, you wouldn’t use the word to describe somebody who sneaks into your house to steal something, or picks your pocket. That’s a kleptes, from which we get our coinage kleptomaniac, usually to describe compulsive shoplifters or people who snitch things while they’re visiting somebody’s house. The lestes is a bandit, a marauder, a highway robber. He’s a sneak too, but once he rushes out from his place of ambush he works in the open, with violence or the threat of it. The kleptes is more of a private nuisance; the lestes is a grave threat to public order. If you can’t use the roads because they’re seething with bandits, your economy grinds to a halt. The men who waylaid the traveler on the road between Jerusalem and Jericho, in Jesus’ parable, were lestai. Barabbas, whom the crowds selected instead of Jesus, was a lestes. Jesus calls Satan by both nouns: he works both by stealth and by violence.

Here is the overwhelming irony of it all. Jesus has preached in the open, sometimes to thousands of people at a time, whether on the hillside or in the plains or in the precincts of the Temple. He has never once even threatened violence, but has rather taught that we must love our enemies and pray for those who hate us and who use us badly. Yet there he is, crucified as if he were the greatest threat to law and order, to peace, to the State itself, as if he had the power to turn the whole world upside down. And here those who crucified Jesus saw more than they knew they saw — because in fact he, so gentle that he does not break a bruised reed or quench a guttering candle, has come to change the world forever.

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We suppose that compassion will always predispose us toward someone, and I guess that’s right, according to our use of the word, though sometimes, I dare say, the more you know about someone’s true feelings rather than what he or she says about them, the less you will want to hang around, much less to offer your assistance. If we’re to believe the old fables, crocodiles also weep. But most of the time, anyway, it’s enough just to see that someone is suffering, and not to inquire too closely into the tangle of causes. The compassion that the superior person feels for the inferior may be called pity, and that too requires real tact, if we’re to pity without making the recipient of our pity feel low or mean or contemptible, or without weakening him. I had a good friend who refused to let his son enter his house until he promised that he would get himself into a drug rehab program. The boy camped out in the backyard, and when one day my friend found that his car was gone, in all deliberate calmness he called the police and had his son picked up. I am certain that my friend felt compassion for his son, and that was why he permitted himself to appear callous and heartless, when he really was quite the opposite. Sure, most people who appear callous are so; most, but not all. His son did turn his life around. He told me so, at the reception after his father’s funeral. Of the three children, I think he was the most broken up.

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The word compassion, from the Latin passio — passion, suffering — is a nice doublet of Greek sympatheia, which means exactly the same thing, and, after meandering through late Latin and medieval French, enters English as sympathy. There’s not a hair’s difference between them, unless it’s that we consider compassion as something active, and sympathy as something passive: as for example the sympathetic vibration of one bell in response to another, if they’re of the same tone and you ring the one near the other. But the word in the New Testament that’s translated as compassion isn’t related to sympathy. It’s the completely different verb splanchnizomai — to be moved within the splanchna, the inward parts (in colloquial American, the innards), that is, the heart, the liver, the spleen, the kidneys, the “bowels of compassion,” as the old phrase put it. The verb is in the middle voice, implying that the subject both performs and suffers the action.

Let me explain. In English, we distinguish only between the active voice and the passive voice. In the active, the subject performs the action: Superman stopped the train. In the passive, the subject suffers the action: The train was stopped by Superman. But many languages also distinguish the middle voice, partaking of both active and passive: The train stopped. The train doesn’t stop something else; it stops itself; it stops. So too the powerful movement of compassion: you perform it, yes, but it moves within you and you suffer the movement. It happens within yourself. Compassion is not supposed to take the place of justice. It isn’t sentimentality, which is often pretty hard-hearted. But it is good both for the giver and the receiver — and maybe better for the giver.

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And when the Pope saw that fine beast,
He knew they’d gathered for a feast,
And how they all took care, he spied,
To scrape the thistles from his hide.”

That’s from the Roman de Fauvel, a rollicking satire on foolery and jobbery and ambition and graft, written in the 1310’s in medieval France — and that’s my impromptu translation, too. It’s not that Fauvel is just a dumb animal. His name tells us who he is. This is medieval literature, recall, and that means that you can’t overlook the little things, just as in medieval architecture you’ve got surprises in the smallest sculpted capitals or in the simplest fronds of a rose window.

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Anyway, he’s fau(x) vel, the false veil, and the poet — we don’t know who he was — says that his letters stand for Flaterie, Avarice, Vilanie, Varieté, Envie, and Lascheté — that’s Flattery, Avarice, Villainy, Fickelness, Envy, and Laxity. And everybody wants to “curry Fauvel,” and make his coat all shiny, and give him that good warm feeling you get when you know everybody’s your friend.

How about that! Our Word of the Week is favor, and the most common figure of speech in English that uses that word is “to curry favor,” and it didn’t come from the word favor at all, but from a horse in a satirical poem in Old French! But here’s where misunderstandings sometimes get right to the heart of something. If I said, “He just wants to curry Fauvel,” which is what the phrase was in Middle English, you wouldn’t know what I was talking about. Most of the old beast-names in the fables are unfamiliar to us now: maybe we’d recognize Chanticleer, Chaucer’s rooster who has bad dreams, and Reynard the Fox; and closer to our own time we’ve got Rudolph with his nose so bright, and a couple of others. So people heard “curry Fauvel” as “curry FAVOR,” and really, that’s the same kind of action, though maybe not quite as absurd or sneaky. You’re flattering somebody, or playing up to somebody, to get something out of him: to get favor.

The actual word, favor, comes into English also from the French, in the Middle Ages. Its meaning covered an interesting range of desirable qualities, from beauty and charm, to a kindly predisposition or partiality, to an act of kindness, as in our phrase “to do a favor.” From that partiality — to favor one side over another, as my favorite baseball team is the Cardinals, so that I pull for them to beat whomever they’re playing — comes the old-fashioned sense of resemblance. “He favors his mother’s side,” we might say, not talking about his attitude toward that side of the family, but about his having their eyes (perhaps fortunately) or their nose (perhaps unfortunately). Of course, strict justice in the courtroom is not supposed to favor one side or another. But culture and personal feelings are a different matter. When I was a boy playing Little League Baseball, sometimes we didn’t have an umpire, so we’d dragoon one of the fathers in the seats to do the job. We took for granted that he would not favor his own son’s team. It was usually the reverse: Dads would bend quite a bit in the other direction. But if Dad is in the stands, of course he’s going to be cheering his boy!

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It’s the same for me, being an Italian-American. It pleases me to think of all the Italian singers we once had — Frank Sinatra was the greatest of them, but Bobby Darin was immensely talented, and then you had the effortless Perry Como, and Dean Martin, Jerry Vale, Louie Prima, Mario Lanza, Dion, Fabian, Vic Damone — so many! And the All-Spaghetti Baseball Team is pretty stacked, too, with guys like Joe DiMaggio, Yogi Berra, and Mike Mussina.

I have a hunch that the ideas and feelings behind our word favor are to be found in similar words in other languages. In Hebrew, the word is chen, and it could mean that you are pleasant to look at, or that your movements are gracious, or that people regard you in a kindly way — and not just people, but God: “And Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.”

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Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true

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Una lagrimetta — a little tear! Tears are something of a mystery, aren’t they? I once knew an old man who had some physical condition that made him prone to weep whenever he spoke about anything at all that was a little sad, or a little dear and sweet to him, or beautiful. I don’t know what the condition was, but the tears came easily, without sobbing or moaning. It actually made him appear more noble than otherwise. I’ve heard all my life that men should weep more, by way of expressing their feelings; but frankly, expressing your feelings can often be a real burden to people who are in their way or who are their target. Men do weep less than women do, as all cultures have recognized, and there may be a physiological explanation for much of the difference: their tear ducts are longer, so the tears simply don’t come out as easily.

Yet when Jesus heard Mary the sister of Lazarus say, “Lord, if you had been here, our brother would not have died,” he was deeply troubled in his heart, and he went to the tomb where the man was laid. And then comes the shortest verse in the Bible: “Jesus wept.” Don’t take that for granted. When somebody said to Epictetus the Stoic, testing him, “Your son has died,” Epictetus replied, “And since when did I ever say he was immortal?” There’s your Stoic ideal. The Epicurean, meanwhile, might weep, though he’s all about leading a calm life and fleeing from pain and sadness, but he too would consider it beneath him, because reason and experience tell us that everybody must die, so why should we make a fuss over it? Yet Jesus wept. And we take our lead from him. And if we harden our hearts against sadness, might we also risk hardening our souls against beauty? Or against joy that is so great — as when the chorus rises to sing the ode that is the triumphant climax of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony — that tears come to us before reason, slow and halting, can tell us why?

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A little on the word itself: you’d think that English tear and Latin lacrima could not possibly be cousins. You’d also think that English day and Latin dies would have to be related. Wrong both ways; the similarity between day and dies is strictly coincidental, as is the similarity between English have and Latin habere. And tear and lacrima are cousins in fact; so then also Latin’s descendant in Italian lagrima. So too are Welsh deigr and Irish der, and Greek dakru. Original Indo-European d became t in Proto-Germanic: think of Latin duo, but English two; Latin decem, but English ten. So the odd one in the bunch is lacrima, with the l instead of a d. By the way, you can ignore the -ima at the end, which is just an ancient suffix for making certain kinds of nouns out of verbs. How do we go from d to l? Well, it didn’t happen across the board in Latin, but it did happen to a small handful of words in which the Sabine pronunciation caught on and became the standard. Put your tongue in the position to make a d, but don’t press hard; keep your nasal passage shut so you don’t make an n, don’t force air out of your mouth, but let the vocal cords vibrate. You will be making a dental l. Linguists call it the “Sabine L.” It shows up also in Latin lingua, which is a cousin of English tongue; the insides of the word redolent, which has to do with odor; and remember what the Romans called Odysseus: Ulixes!

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Three is an important number, isn’t it? If “one is no number,” as people in the Renaissance used to say, then 3 is the first odd number. It’s the first prime number after 2. There are three times, we say, past, present, and future. We perceive three physical dimensions, length, breadth, and height. We use triangulation to pinpoint the source of a signal. Trigonometry used to take up a whole year of high school math: the study of triangles. You can tile a floor with triangles of the same shape and size, regardless of what the angles are. The number 3 is also convenient for us, given the way we conceive our integers. Since it’s a factor of 9, you can tell if any number is divisible by 3 by adding all the digits. If the sum is divisible by 3, then so is the original number. When you do it, you can mentally skip over all the 3’s, 6’s, 9’s, 12’s, and so on, so that you can look at something monstrous, like 359120611, and ignore the 3, the 9, the 12, and the 6, and what’s left is just 5 + 1 + 1, or really just 1. So when you divide it by 3, the remainder will be 1. It’s because we write our numbers out in base 10, so that 9 and its factor 3 will have that property. If our base were 13, then you’d find the same property in 12 and factors of 12: 2, 3, 4, and 6. Try it — or have your older kids try it!

You can describe, with mathematical precision, the motions of two bodies orbiting each other, if you have their mass, their initial position, and their momentum. But if you add a third body, all bets are off. There are no general solutions, and even tiny differences in the initial conditions can produce widely divergent and unpredictable results. That’s the so-called “three body problem,” that Isaac Newton first wondered about, after the apple hit him in the bean.

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How about the word, three? It’s one of the most reliable of all the number-words in our big Indo-European family: Latin tres, Welsh tri, Russian tri, Sanskrit trayah, Albanian tre, Hittite tere, and so on. Hittite? Sure! It is one of our kin. It’s pleasant to consider that the native tongue of Uriah the Hittite was related to English of all things, and not to Hebrew. We also have our word thirty, originally meaning three tens, and our word thirteen, meaning three and ten. But we once had a delightful word for that unlucky number 13. Just as eleven meant one-left, that is, one left over after you knock ten off, and twelve meant two-left, so we had Old English threolf, which would now be threlve, meaning three-left. I like that word, don’t you? Just as I like another word we might have kept, for the number 110, from Old English enleofantig, meaning eleven tens, or — and fans of Tolkien’s The Hobbit will like this one — eleventy!

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Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true

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The second word, the ashes, is not related to the word for dust, for all that they sound similar. For one thing, ‘aphar begins with a glottal stop, very hard for us English speakers to pronounce at the beginning of a word; that’s what is signified by the transcription with the backwards and upside-down apostrophe. If you want to hear a glottal stop, just say the word bottle as a Cockney would say it, gulping down the t’s: baw-‘ul. But ashes were, like dust, also a sign of humiliation or worthlessness. “Your sayings are proverbs of ashes,” says Job to one of his annoying friends, Zophar. They could also be a sign of self-humiliation, as with Job himself, or as with the King of Nineveh, who, when he heard the prophecy of Jonah, that Nineveh would be destroyed, repented in sackcloth and ashes.

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What’s the difference between dust and ashes? In American English, the word dust refers only to what is light and dry and insubstantial, as when overtilling and exhaustion of the soil led to the calamity of the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma and southern Kansas, which led to the migration of farmers to California, so memorably captured in Steinbeck’s novel, The Grapes of Wrath. But ash or ashes must be what’s left after you’ve burned something down to dust. You can have dust without a fire, but not ash. By the way, the tree we call the ash has nothing to do with the ashes left in the furnace. They’re just two words that happen to sound alike. In Old English, each was spelled æsc, with that first character that looks like an a and an e squashed together. Well done, too, that character, because the vowel we pronounce in the word ash really is between ah and eh. Try it — notice where your tongue goes when you say loss, lass, less.

Anyway, today’s word ash comes from an Indo-European root, as-, having to do with burning. Here’s a tip for any of our readers who might be teaching their kids Latin. Have you noticed sometimes how an s turns into an r as you go from the nominative to the other cases? What happened is that an s pronounced between two vowels, actually pronounced like a z in prehistoric Latin, a buzzing sound, turned into the buzzing sound of a trilled r. Sure, it’s hard for us English speakers now to hear the similarity, but so it happened. The noun is tempus, with an s, but when a vowel followed it, it turned into an r, as in the adjective temporalis. So in Latin, something that is as dry as ash is ar-idus, which gives us English arid: and yes, that r there was originally an s, and the word arid is a cousin of our word ash. The word combustion is also a cousin, but that would take a long time to explain.

When I was a little boy, I saw ashes all the time. We had a coal furnace, and every week my father shoveled out the ashes from inside, and put them in an ashcan for the town to pick up at the roadside. The ashes were gray and very soft, almost like talcum powder, and burning coal, at least the anthracite we had in our town, had a sharp clean smell to it, not unpleasant. But everybody had those ashcans. They were useful for quite a few things. Before we got a bathtub at our house, I took my baths in one of them — I was only 2 or 3, after all. But we’d also use them for bottled drinks and chipped ice when we went to the lake to spend the day, all 20 or so of us — Grandma and Grandpa and aunts and uncles and cousins.

Then of course there was ASH WEDNESDAY, sometimes called in Middle English “PULVER WEDNESDAY.” Everybody in our Catholic school went to Mass that morning and got the ashes marked on our foreheads. You’d see them on plenty of people in town, too. The tradition of a period of fasting for the 40 days before Easter comes from the early 300’s at the latest, and then Pope Gregory the Great set the period as 46 days, culminating in Easter, the 47th day. The idea is that you don’t fast on Sunday, and there are six Sundays in that period. So that means that if Easter is day 47, Ash Wednesday will be day 1 — count them. And while we’re counting, let us hear the words, “Remember, Man, that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return.”

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So I’ll take you to another scene — this time it’s a jolly deer hunt in the dead of winter, and the lord of the manor and his men have had great luck hunting deer. The poet — we’re in the middle of the splendid Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, from the 1300’s — describes with gusto the flaying and butchering of the biggest of the deer right on the spot. It takes about 20 lines, beginning with “slitting the slot,” which is the cleft that divides the breast, and they end with the back parts. Here’s Tolkien’s translation of the part I’ve got in mind:

Thus by the bones of the back they broke off with skill,
down even to the haunch, all that hung there together,
and hoisted it up all whole and hewed it off there:
and that they took for the numbles, as I trow is their name.

Numbles! That comes from the Middle French word nombles, referring in a broad sense, if you were talking about hunting or cookery, to the loins of an animal; specifically, in a deer, to the fatty region between the thighs. That wasn’t the best part, but people did use it. In a pig, it seems to have referred to the chine, along the ridge of the back, and at the church of Sainte-Croix, in the village of Vasles in 1393, it’s recorded that the Feast of All Saints was celebrated with a feast of pork numbles. In Middle French it might also refer, in human beings, to what we always keep covered unless we’re in the bathtub. So Marco Polo — in a French translation — records this encounter, which I’ll render into modern English, except for the key word: “The other men asked them how come they went around naked, and weren’t ashamed to show their numbles, and they said it was because they came into this world naked and without any clothes.”

Well, in those days, you didn’t want to waste any part of an animal, so the numbles, which weren’t so good to serve up by themselves, would be minced and heavily spiced, and that is where we in English got the phrase numble pie! I said that the phrase had nothing to do, historically, with the word humble: French nombles came from late Latin lumulus or lumbulus, the diminutive of lumbo, loin. If you ask me how lumulus with an L became nombles with an N, I can only guess that something similar happened in French to what happened in English, except that it went in the opposite direction, sticking an N where it didn’t belong, as opposed to taking an N away where it did belong.

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It’s what is called faulty separation. Say, real fast, again and again, “A numble pie, a numble pie, a numble pie!” Don’t you find yourself on the verge of saying “An umble pie”? And the H in the word humble was, in English dialects, either silent (as in honor), or sometimes pronounced and sometimes not, depending on where you were (as in homage or ‘omage), or just lightly pronouced as H’s are (as in history). So it’s easy to hear how you could get from a numble pie to an umble pie (as you pronounce it), which would be printed as an humble pie, or simply humble pie. To eat humble pie means that you eat something that sure isn’t filet mignon. And now it means, to change the metaphor, that you have to swallow your pride, or, to change the dish, that you have to eat crow. Why crow? Because crow, apparently, doesn’t taste very good.

By the way, I’ve talked before about this oddball mistake that produces a funny new way of saying something old: see the discussion for the word tawdry. It’s how we got the words nickname, adder, newt, orange, uncle, and apron, depending on whether the N from the word an got stuck onto the following word beginning with a vowel, or whether the N that began a word got detached from it and turned the previous article a into an. If you’ve ever seen the film Lawrence of Arabia, you can hear the Arab youths doing the same thing to the L on his name, hearing it as al-Awrence, so they call him Awrence. Somehow that doesn’t ring right, does it — Awrence of Arabia?

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The Old English verb spellian, built from the noun, meant to speak, to talk, in the principal sense of telling a story or issuing a proclamation. If you went to the spellstow, the spell-place, it was to hear the news. That’s related to that other meaning of spell, which is what magicians lay on you: it generally has a negative meaning, or at least slightly suspicious, as when you are under someone’s spell, but on the other hand, if you are listening to a fascinating story, or if you hear the ringing tones of truth from a preacher of rare ability, you may be spellbound, and that’s not bad at all — assuming, as I say, that the preacher is uttering the truth.

So how did our word come to mean what drives little kids crazy, that is, to put the letters in the right order so that they spell out sieve and receive rather than seive and recieve? That’s an odd story in its own right. We know that French is a daughter of Latin, so it’s a sister language to Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian, but the Franks who first lived in what’s now France spoke Frankish, which was a Germanic language. And a lot of words entered French from Frankish. So it was with Frankish spelon, which was pretty much the same word as ours, but as a part of the French language, it changed its meaning over the centuries, to mean to explain, rather like the sense in our phrase, “To spell it out.” So when the Normans invaded and brought their words with them, they brought the now French verb espeler, and the two words merged. How do you set a word in order? You spell it.

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Is English spelling crazy? I don’t think so, not really. French is a lot harder: think of the word Août, meaning August, the month. How do you say it? “OO!” Welsh is more sensible than French, but we English readers aren’t used to some of their ways, so that we see a word like tywyllwch, and we say, “You’ve got to be kidding!” But the problem there is that they’ve got ll for a sound we don’t have in English — a voiceless l — and they’ve got ch for a sound we’ve got only in Scots English, the hard h sound in Loch — and they use w for a vowel, a really pronounced and rounded oo. So it’s tywyllwch! — meaning, darkness.

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And they slipped and slid and made merry with skates and sleds, too. “The coasting!” cries Riis in admiration and delight. “Let anyone who wishes to see real democratic New York at play take a trip on such a night through the uptown streets that dip east and west into the great arteries of traffic, and watch the sights there when young America is in its glory.” What do the policemen do? Except at railway crossings, Riis says, “they discreetly close an eye, or look the other way.” And now, what do I hear of in our time, but children forbidden to run in the playground during what short and stingy recess they are granted during the school day? It is winter here in New Hampshire, and we have had snow on the ground for a month and a half, and I’ve neither seen nor heard children sledding or sliding or skating — in snow, what I always thought was the finest plaything in the world. Even our old dog Jasper loved the snow, partly because of his silky long hair — he had no undercoat of fur — that didn’t hold the water.

I’m going to end with the last paragraph in Riis’ wonderful article, but first, I’ve got to say something interesting about the word. Those of you who know Latin or Greek may consider that there aren’t any words in those languages that begin with sl-, but there are all kinds of words in the Germanic and the Slavic languages that do, and in other of our big family of languages likewise. When that happens, historical linguists say, “Aha! Something is hiding those words!” And sure enough, in Latin and in Greek, separately, the initial s- was lost, as also in words that began with sm- and sn-: so we’ve got English snow, but its cousin in Latin is nix, and we’ve got English smile, but Latin mirari, to gaze at, to wonder. So we’ve got a lot of slippery words in English, all cousins, having to do with what you do on the ice, whether on purpose or not, and other words that have to do with slipping: slip, slide, sleek, slump, slouch, slush, slime, slumber, and so on. If they have relations in Latin, they will begin only with l: lubricus, “slippery,” languere, “to slouch,” limus, “mud,” linere, “to smear.” Why, there’s even that little critter that leaves a slippery trail: limax, “slug.” That doesn’t mean that all Latin words beginning with L correspond to English words beginning with SL. Most of the time, there wasn’t an initial S to lose in the first place. You see, the historical linguist is a bit of a detective, gathering evidence and tracking the changes as they happened.

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But here are Riis’ last few sentences, as I promised. Consider, if you were an archaeologist ten thousand years from now, rummaging about the ruins of our world, the number of reasons you could bring forth to say, “These words could not have been written after 1950.”

The great city lying silent under its soft white blanket at night, with its myriad of lights twinkling and rivaling the stars, is beautiful beyond compare. Go watch the moonlight on forest and lake in the park, when the last straggler has gone and the tramp of the lonely policeman’s horse has died away under the hill; listen to the whisper of the trees, all shining with the dew of Boreas’s breath, of the dreams they dream in their long sleep, of the dawn that is coming, the warm sunlight of spring, and say that life is not worth living in America’s metropolis, even in winter, whatever the price of coal, and I shall tell you that you are fit for nothing but treason, stratagem, and spoils; for you have no music in your soul.

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Every so often, somebody like George Bernard Shaw comes along, insisting that we jigger English spelling so that it will record accurately how we pronounce our words. It seems reasonable, right? Yet we’d lose a lot more than we’d gain by it. First, there’s the little matter that we don’t all pronounce the words in the same way — CLERK is “CLARK” in Chichester but “CLURK” in Chicago; WHICH is “HWITCH” in Ireland and in some pockets of the United States, but “WITCH” everywhere else, and let’s not even get to how we say our L’s and R’s and I’s, or Cockney “URF” for EARTH! Second, English words sometimes change their sounds when the form changes, and if we changed the spelling to reflect the sounds, we would lose the immediate sense of kinship: we say ELEVATE, with a clear T, but it’s ELEVATION for the noun, and do we really want to spell it “ELEVAISHUN”? Third, the old spellings give us clues as to a word’s origin from or relations to words in other languages. We see a word like MACHINE, pronounced MASHEEN, but the old spelling allows us to recognize the word in Latin MACHINA or Italian MACCHINA. Anyway, I don’t think that English spelling is all that hard — nowhere near as hard as French or Gaelic spelling.

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Which — or HWICH — brings me to our Word of the Week, know. Oh, that darned KN, the bugbear of little kids trying to spell! Well, we spell it that way because that’s how it used to be pronounced. I think that history shows us what single category of people has been most energetic in inventing alphabets or recording a language in written characters for the first time: Christian missionaries. They really did so wherever they went, if the people did not have those already. And so they did for the Germanic peoples in England. They adapted the Roman alphabet to the Germanic sounds, and they did an excellent job of it, too. They recorded combinations of consonants that didn’t exist in Latin — many of which we take for granted, like SL-, SM-, and SN-, and some of which we don’t have anymore, like WR-, WL-, HN-, HL-, HR-, a few others, and CN-, as in the Old English verb CNAWAN, to KNOW. That CN- faded away over many centuries and was simplified to N-, but by then the standard spelling with KN- had long been fixed in place.

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By the way, such things didn’t happen only in English. It happened in the big branch of our family that gave birth to Latin. It’s why we have English SLIME, but Latin LIMUS, “mud,” and English SLIPPERY, but Latin LUBRICUS, which means the same thing. They lost the SL-, reduced to L; see, what we find easy to say, speakers of other languages don’t at all! And things don’t always get smoothed out over time. Sometimes they clump up. Think it’s hard to say CN-? Try saying Italian SBRIGATI, meaning “HURRY UP!” — with a ZBR — and Italian has a lot of those. It’s because the prefix DIS- was reduced to S-, so they lost the syllable, and gained some really peculiar clusters of consonants at the beginnings of such words, and they’re common ones, too.

Anyway, the monks were really careful to render what they heard, as precisely as they could, so they’re a great source of reliable information for us historians of language. And when they came on a sound that the Roman alphabet couldn’t represent, they invented new characters, including the quite clever æ, which they called “æsc,” that is, “ash”. Try pronouncing, in succession, ah, a (as in bat), e (as in bet). Notice where your tongue is. Doesn’t it move from low in the middle, to low in front, to a little higher in front? The sound in that way is right between ah and eh. So what better way to spell it, than with a and e crushed together?

’ll have more to say this week about what the word know means. I’ll say here at the outset that the more you think about what a human being means when he says, “I know,” the more fascinating and mysterious it is. Our dog Molly knows. She knows that the leash means she’s going for a walk. She knows that if I’m eating a cookie I’ll give her a little piece of it. But she’s not aware that she knows it. Our dog Jasper of happy memory did 75 tricks on command, which is more than most politicians can do, but he didn’t think about them, he didn’t weigh them, he didn’t relate them to other things, he didn’t imagine new tricks — well, with Jasper, you could never be sure about that! And we can also consider that how we know something varies with the object. For example, I know that my favorite pitcher of all time, Bob Gibson, had an Earned Run Average of 1.12 in 1968, over more than 300 innings. It is why a picture of that record ought to illustrate the word “microscopic” in the dictionary. But I also say that I know what it is to feel joy — so different from pleasure! How can I explain it? And what do we mean when we say that we know another human being? In some measure, we know the unknowable God himself, by his own revelation. But here we are on the verge of an unfathomable abyss. Because God exists, knowledge has no limit — no bounds in space or matter or time. It can never pass away.

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gentle airs due at their hour
To fan the earth now waked, and usher in
The evening cool, when he from wrath more cool
Came the mild Judge and Intercessor both
To sentence man.

That’s a good thing indeed. Anger is hot; malice may be cold; but clemency is mild and cool. Yet the Son does not give Adam and Eve a chilly reception. It’s really the other way around. Adam wants to give God the brush-off — he doesn’t want to appear, he doesn’t want to talk, and he doesn’t seem to want to stick around. His heart must be warmed again with love. I take it that it was, and Eve’s heart was also, but that was God’s initiative, not their own.

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So I guess there’s an ambiguity in the words that border upon our Word of the Week: cold, cool, chill, chilly. Lately I’ve been reading Civil War accounts and reminiscences published in various issues of The Century Magazine, 1887-1890, which Debra got for me for Christmas; I collect them in bound volumes of six issues each, about 1000 large and well-stored pages per volume. When the flames of war surround you, how do you react, if you’re supposed to lead men to battle, and the situation turns out not to be as you planned or hoped? One Union general at the infamous “crater” in front of Petersburg, thirty feet deep and a hundred feet in diameter, a great hole in the ground opened up by Union landmines, went cold with intransigence, safely ensconced in a bomb-proof shelter. That was surely bad. But when Grant had the overpowering advantage in numbers before Richmond in 1864, he too was cold, sending wave after wave of men into the battle to die but in their relentless attack to wear away the Confederates. I don’t know that I approve of his elementary strategy there. But I do know that one day, when I was driving with my family on the highway in the winter, on our way to visit our folks in Pennsylvania, all of a sudden I saw, a quarter of a mile ahead of us, on a part of the highway that spanned a brook beneath, a dozen cars strewed on each side of the road, facing in all directions, with a police car there too, because the hollow of the road had turned into an ice rink. I used the gear shift to slow down a little well in advance, threw the car into neutral, and steered through the mess — and I was absolutely cool while doing it, clear-headed, steel-eyed, feeling nothing — I wasn’t shaken up until a minute later when the mess was behind us. That’s what I guess you want in an emergency. I don’t know if you can plan to be that way. I sure didn’t!

Our word cold comes from Anglo-Saxon cald: the same word as German kalt, as an adjective. There was also the noun ciele, pronounced CHEE-eh-luh, meaning cold, and that’s the ancestor of our word chill, also a noun. We built the verb chill from that adjective, and then added that wonderful and productive little suffix -y to get another adjective, chilly. How to explain to somebody who doesn’t speak English as a first language that there’s a difference between cold and chilly? You can know something cold, and that’s really good, but a cold reception is colder and less promising than a chilly reception. There’s something final and decisive about cold that isn’t necessarily so with chilly. You can catch a cold in English, and that’s not so big a deal, but when you get the chills you need to be seen to right away. In Old English, you could get cielewearte — chillwarts! Not a bad word, eh? In England, I think the term is gooseflesh, I guess because geese are excitable birds; in the 1800’s in America we find goosebumps, which you can see on your arms when you’re suddenly exposed to cold or even fear; but where I grew up, it was goosepimples. How about you, dear Readers?

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I wonder what it’s like to live in a world without much green. I’ve just read an account in one of my issues of the old Century Magazine (from 1887), of a Greenlander native, an Eskimo named Jens, who one day did something out of character. For he had been always reliable, cheerful, hard-working, and loyal to his English and Danish commanders. But one morning they couldn’t find him in camp. This was far along the northern coasts of that vast island of ice. He was seeking a land which his father said he saw once, a land sheltered in the interior, a place where grain grew, and the trees were as tall as a man — imagine that! And there was warmth, and the color green. The Greenlanders did love their green, what they could find of it — mainly the arctic willow, a tree that grows only a foot high, but its spring leaves are sweet and richer in vitamin C than an orange. Well, Jens’ friends found him and brought him back, at peril of all their lives, and he remained tractable for a couple of years, but again one day he sought that green and pleasant place, and was seen no more.

We in our northern temperate climes are never without green. That’s because the conifers don’t shed all their needles, and those are always green, from the pleasant mild green of the hemlock, to the rich green of the pine, and the dark green of the fir and the spruce. In Nova Scotia, where we live for part of the year, one of the conifers, the larch or tamarack, does drop its needles, which first turn a striking amber yellow, impressive against the true evergreens. Now, both parts of the word are interesting. The green springs from an ancient root having to do with growing, and that word too is a cousin, as is grass. Of course, it’s not always good to be green: a teenage girl gone dotty with infatuation is called greensick, and if you’re a recruit in the army and you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re called green, like a fresh sprig. Then there’s the English phrase “green with envy,” as if you had gone sour just because someone else was happy. But in general, it’s good to have green things around, and I’ve heard that green is the color most restful to the eyes, either green or the light blue of the sky. Then there’s the ever. Or rather the first syllable: that’s from Old English ece, ege, ae — which became early Modern English aye, pronounced with a long A, in the phrase “for aye,” meaning “forever.” It comes from the same Indo-European root that we find in the first syllable of eternal.

So where there is life, eternal life, the heart beats strong, the eyes see clear, and the fields are ever green.

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What a crazy language English is!

I used to tell my students that they should never use a thesaurus, unless they already knew the meaning of the word they wanted to look up, but somehow it had escaped their minds. It’s especially dangerous in English, because we’ve got a lot of words from three different but often intermingling sources: from the ancient Germanic, from medieval French, and directly from words adopted or coined from Latin (and, to a much lesser extent, Greek). Even within one source, there are often what are called “doublets,” the same basic word that was pronounced differently in the north of England than in the south, or in some other geographical or ethnic divisions, which then became separate words with close but distinct meanings: drag, draw; tug, tow; bow, bough; shirt, skirt; ditch, dike; sweet, soothe; stamp, stomp; champ, chomp; and many more. Let’s think about this for a moment, taking for example English words for a simple idea, that of bigness: big, large, huge, great, enormous, vast, humongous, immense, massive, gross. Those words are hardly interchangeable! Even the two closest words, big (of unknown origin in England) and large (from Norman French), can’t be switched so easily. Helen may be a big woman on the committee, meaning that she’s important, but if you call her a large woman on the committee, your hearer may have a picture in his mind of Helen sitting on the committee, and when she sits on it, it isn’t going anywhere! An elephant is massive, but you’d never call it vast, which has to do with extent, such as from star to star. George Washington at Valley Forge was resolute, and that’s good, but General Howe in Philadelphia was stolid, and that was not good at all — not for his army, anyway.

So it is with our Word of the Week, weary, fit for the season that ends the year, if you look on things with a certain resignation. If you say, “I’m tuckered out,” you may be weary, but it’s more likely that you’ve just been shoveling two feet of snow out of your 60-foot driveway, and your arms are sore. The expression may even have something jovial about it. If you say, “I’m exhausted,” maybe you’ve spent the last 10 hours scraping shingles off the roof, and though there’s nothing jovial about that, you’re mainly referring to your body, not to your soul. And there are colloquial ways of saying these things, usually with a comic touch: American pooped, British knackered, and so on.

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But with weary we hover between the body and the soul. You don’t get weary from a day’s work, because one day of hard labor is not going to touch your soul. Jack London’s got a story, “The Apostate,” in which a young man who has been laboring assiduously, like a human machine, in the textile mills since he was a small boy suddenly finds himself no longer willing to work — and he no longer cares about the welfare of his mother or his siblings. He says, basically, “I’m not going back, and I don’t care.” He is weary: the many gray years have gotten to him, and I’d say that such a person, without the grace of God, is never going to revive again.

One of the signs of weariness is that you don’t care if you ever feast again, because you don’t feel you have anything to feast about. The converse is true also. Unless you celebrate the feast, and that means unless you know in your inmost heart that there is reason to feast, you will grow weary. If you don’t feast, you may be irritably busy, like a human hamster on an endless wheel, or like the mechanized human being in London’s story. Or you may be listless and sluggardly. Either way we’ve got neither rest nor real energetic labor nor feasting, but something like radio static played at full volume. Silence and song are related; noise is different. Feasting and resting are related; weariness is different. So we are looking forward with anticipatory joy to the feast that’s coming very soon!

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On the word itself: it’s from Anglo-Saxon, and it’s got close kin in other Germanic languages. There’s a nice compound that shows up once, slaepwerig, “sleep-weary,” that is, weary from lack of sleep. It’s in a riddle-poem in a book of such (Tolkien did not invent riddle-poems!). One of the clues is that “Often a man or maiden comes to greet me, sleep-weary.” The consensus is that the answer to the riddle is, “A millstone!” Does that mean that the millstone, turned by a water-wheel, was running all night long? I don’t know, but that would certainly weary you, wouldn’t it? We’re not sure where the root comes from. But the -ig part is easy. It makes an adjective out of a noun or a verb. It’s the same suffix you’ve got in Greek -ik(os), in Latin -ic(us), German -isch and -ig, and now modern English -ish and -y. The suffix is quite alive and productive still. Any English speaker will immediately understand a made-up word like painterish or pillowy. Think of all the -y words we make up from animals: doggy, catty, horsy, clammy, fishy, goosey.

Stay with us, dear Readers! We aren’t going to drop off by the wayside!

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It’s Advent, and our Christmas Special is available again at Word & Song. We hope that some of our subscribers enjoy our little magazine enough to share it as a gift with friends and family, particularly those who might value a bit of respite from the weary world.

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Sometimes our Word of the Week falls into the sub-category we call “What’s in a Name?” But today we have a single name which is also a complete sentence, a prophecy, and the greatest mystery in the world.

Where shall I start? How about with Hebrew names? Whenever you see the word-parts YAH or EL in a Hebrew name, you should think, “This name might be a sentence.” The YAH is short for the name that may not be uttered, which in English we translate as “I AM” or “I AM WHO AM.” And that too is a great mystery, and maybe I’ll discuss it someday. In translations of the Bible, whenever the Hebrew reads YHWH, we read Kyrios (Greek) or Dominus (Latin) or Lord (English), because when the Jewish people read Scripture aloud, they would substitue the word ADONAI, LORD, when they got to YHWH. They’d also “point” the word with the vowels of ADONAI, because that’s what the reader was going to utter, and not YHWH; and that’s how later on people mistook the purpose of those points, and we ended up with the name JEHOVAH. You see, in Hebrew, vowels are usually denoted by little marks above or below or tucked into the side of the consonants. When Jesus says that not a “jot or a tittle” shall pass from the Law until all is fulfilled, I have no doubt he was thinking of a little pin-prick or a tiny stroke to mark a vowel. The EL is short for ELOHIM, a plural suggesting plenitude and not number, which we translate as GOD. So the name JOEL means “the Lord is GOD,” and ELIJAH means “God is the LORD!” And the name HEZEKIAH — the name of one of the few good kings of Judah — means “THE LORD gives strength,” while EZECHIEL means “GOD gives strength.”

Now then, what about EMMANUEL, or, closer to the Hebrew, IMMANUEL? Well, we see the -EL there, and that’s the emphatic part of the name, the syllable we lay the stress on. So GOD is doing something. What is it? First, let me say that in Hebrew, as in Welsh (of all things), the object of a preposition is usually expressed as a suffix on the preposition itself. Here, the preposition is ‘IM, well translated as English WITH, and in a powerful sense, too. By the way, if you want to pronounce it right, you have to open it with a glottal stop. Have you ever heard how Cockneys will swallow the T at the end of a syllable, and instead of FOOTBALL say FOO’BALL? That’s a glottal stop. So you have to OPEN the word with one of those, as if you were suddenly opening the back of your throat to let the air flow. ‘IM means WITH, as I said, but here it’s meant as suggesting FELLOWSHIP, COMPANIONSHIP, being TOGETHER with someone, and if it’s GOD who is with you, he is AT YOUR SIDE, giving you his HELP. “God is WITH YOU in all you do,” said Abimelech to Abraham — that’s ‘imka. Poor Job longs for the days when “the Almighty was yet WITH ME” — that’s ‘immadi.

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So the prophet Isaiah reveals to the daft and sottish King Ahaz that a day will come when “a virgin shall be with child, and shall bear a son, and shall call his name EMMANUEL.” It is a Messianic promise; there are no other Emmanuels in Scripture. The ‘IM is there at the beginning. The -ANU- suffix is for the first person plural, US. The name is at the end, -EL, GOD. Again, the final syllable receives the stress: “With us is GOD!” Not “with us is Samson,” or “with us is David,” or “with us is Elijah,” as worthy as those men were, but “with us is GOD!”

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The obvious way for anybody at the time to interpret that verse was that God’s presence and his aid would be made manifest in some great representative of God who was yet to come, a second David, a greater Moses. Nobody then could conceive that God intended the verse to be understood literally: that God would be in their midst in the flesh. A representative standing in for God? Anybody could accept that. The high priest was such a representative. But God himself, the Son of God, the Word made Flesh, to dwell among us? How is it possible? Rather, only with God who is present in his totality in the smallest of the seeds, in the fleetest moment of time, in the flicker of an electron, only with that true God is it possible.

This of course is the great and solemn and joyful mystery of Christmas, that the Word who spoke the world into existence humbles himself to come among us as a speechless and helpless little child. Had we known he was coming, we’d have barred the gates. He had to steal into our world of sin in order to stand beside us, for thirty years known only as the son of a carpenter named Joseph. But that was not the end of the story.

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The strongest argument against kings, I guess, is that nobody is to be trusted with such power, and no doubt kings have not always comported themselves very well. Yet the ideal is close to the human heart. I think of the saintly King Louis IX of France, sitting in the shade of an oak tree on the outskirts of Paris, available to any person of any rank or station, who wished to appeal to him directly for justice. He did that regularly. His advice to his son, the future Philip III, is golden. Or I should say that it is truly kingly, almost as if the legendary Arthur of the Round Table had come to life. It is a blend of strength and humility, personal care for the people, scrupulous honesty, and genuine kindness. Typical is the advice he gives Philip when a poor man contends with a rich man: “Sustain the poor rather than the rich, until the truth is made clear, and then do justice to them.” This also, concerning where the real strength of a kingdom lies: “Preserve [your towns and cities] in the estate and the liberty in which your predecessors kept them, and if there be anything to amend, amend and preserve their favor and their love. For it is by the strength and the riches of your good cities and your good towns that the native and the foreigner, especially your peers and your barons, are deterred from doing ill to you.”

You see, in the Middle Ages there was no idea of some all-encompassing “divine right of kings.” Louis was guided and curbed by the law of God and the Church, and more than that, like other kings of his time, he knew that even if it was only for self-interest, he had to foster and to protect the liberties of his cities and towns, and of other “chartered” bodies such as the universities. They had common rivals — ambitious or rapacious lords among the landed gentry. That was the typical flanking action for a medieval king, to unite with the townsmen.

But there I am talking politics — when the appeal of a king like Louis is something different. It’s the idea of law and fatherly protection and care, embodied in a person who is himself under law, not in an institution, certainly not in a tangle of bureaucratic regulations. Sure, I’m quite aware of what bad people can do to a thing that is naturally good, and the better it is, the worse it becomes when it goes bad. But I think it’s a lot harder to explain to a child what a premier is, or a president, than a king. By nature, we grasp what a king is. Our good friend the Lion in The Wizard of Oz is not the president of the forest!

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Scripture isn’t all that enamored of kings. The most common judgment we read is such as this: “And Ahab did what was evil in the sight of the Lord.” When the people first demand a king so that they can be like the nations roundabout, the judge and prophet Samuel blames them for it, and foretells the hardships they are calling down upon themselves. Nevertheless, he does anoint David — the beloved; and the Messiah, the great and ultimate king, is to come from David’s line. The Jews looked forward with longing to that future King; and it’s not by accident that J. R. R. Tolkien named the climactic book of his epic trilogy, The Return of the King. Nothing shabby or low-down, nothing like the sly senator Silas Ratcliffe in Henry Adams’ novel Democracy, or the American jobbers and confidence men in Charles Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit, but a real king, honest, brave, self-sacrificing, and pure. Tolkien intended his Aragorn to be a human and legendary shadow of the true King whose return Christians await.

The word king is a deeply personal one, too. It comes from Old English cyning, a verbal noun built from cynn, kin: as if the ruler is a “kinning,” someone who unites all the kin. Such a cyning, among the prehistoric German peoples, was like a chief of an Indian tribe, where everybody is thought to be related to everybody else. Our word has cousins everywhere across the Indo-European map, in words having to do with natural generation: Latin genus, kind; Greek genos, people, tribe; Sanskrit janati, to give birth; Old Irish gniid, to make; and many, many more. But there’s also, from early Latin gnasci, to be born, such words as natal and nativity, after the g was lost before the n (for the same phenomenon, think of English gnaw) — and the French word, with loss of intervocalic t, Noel. Which is what we are now preparing for, aren’t we?

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When I was a boy, we usually had Thanksgiving supper at home, but after that we went to Nonna’s house, where a conversation like this was typical:

NONNA. “Tony, have a piece of blueberry pie!”
TONY. “Sure, thanks!”
NONNA. “Tony, you want a piece of apple pie?”
TONY. “You bet! Thanks!”
NONNA. “Tony, how about a piece of lemon pie?”
TONY. “That’s great! Thanks!”
NONNA. “Tony, here’s a piece of pumpkin pie.”
TONY (feeling tight round the middle). “Um, Nonna, I’m full.”
NONNA. “What’s the matter? You don’t like my pumpkin pie?!”

See, even I wasn’t quite a bottomless pit, though you’d need floodlights and binoculars to find that bottom!

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One thing I loved for Thanksgiving dinner was cranberry sauce when I was a kid. And I still do, but ever since we’ve been going to live in Nova Scotia for the summer, I’ve gotten used to Debra’s and Jessica’s homemade jellies and sauces made from the wild cranberries I gather up there, and their relations the wild lingonberries, which the natives call foxberries. They are delicious, and you can freeze them and keep them forever. I’ve found, too, that neither one of them is susceptible to mold. They don’t go bad even if you leave them on the stalk over the winter. I’ve arrived in Nova Scotia in June and gone to my favorite cranberry field, and found berries that the weather didn’t pop or the animals eat, and they are — right through fall and winter and spring — juicy and delicious, and rich rather than tart or sour. They’re good for you too, of course, as the Pilgrims themselves noted, saying that they helped protect against scurvy and “hoof diseases.” In the far north, beyond the tree line, people have had to get a lot of their nutrients from berries, and sure enough, the Lapps and the Finns would season their meat with lingonberries, and the natives in North America seasoned their pemmican with cranberries, and the Pilgrims themselves harvested the berries for seasonings and jams, so important over the winter.

When we think of cranberries, we think of flooded paddies or bogs, and cranberries do like that peaty soil, but you don’t need to put on galoshes to get cranberries, because they will grow in fields with poor soil, exposed to the elements, along with their cousins the lingonberries, and blueberries, blackberries, and bilberries. And I’ve found lingonberries up there where almost nothing else will grow, except for wild juniper — places that are more like the tundra than like what the Pilgrims found in Plymouth. As for the juniper, it’s like wintergreen in this way: crush the berries between your fingers, and the smell is clean and sharp and fresh. Why the old-timers on our island didn’t flavor their moonshine with juniper, I’ll never know.

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Which does bring me to a funny family story. The first time we took the kids to our little cottage in Nova Scotia, it was over the Thanksgiving holidays in 2003, and our next-door neighbors Tony and Helen, old-timers for sure, invited us over for dinner. That’s what people used to do, after all. “But they didn’t know you!” somebody might say. Well, of course they didn’t, and how better to get to know us than to have dinner? Besides, we had drivenup for a very quick visit, and they knew we couldn’t have had any food in the house, because we’d only just bought it. So we had dinner, and that was the first time in my life I ever had moose pie, or moose anything. Tony had shot the moose himself, if I remember. But before we ate, he asked me what I’d like to drink.

“What do you have?” I asked. “Wa-a-l,” said Tony, “we have beer, we have pop, we have coffee, we have shine, we have —” but before he could go on, I said, “Hold on a second — did you say shine?” “Yes,” said Tony. “As in moonshine?” “Yes,” he said, “I made it myself!” “I’ll have some of that,” I said. He brought it out, and it was a clear pale green liquid, which smelled like yeast or wet dough, and sort of tasted like that, if you soaked dough in water and then took the dough out and drank the water instead. He’d have done better to brew that stuff with juniper or cranberries! Which makes me wonder — I see that people have made cranberry liqueur. Anybody here ever tried it?

Here’s a note on the word: it’s actually from Dutch Kraanbeere, meaning crane-berry, which is what the English word was supposed to suggest too. As for crane, that comes from an ancient Indo-European root that was onomatopoetic: it mimics the sound a crane makes. The root gives us Latin grac- in graculus, jackdaw, from which we get English grackle, and those birds sound as clunky as their name does. In the Germanic branch, the root gave us the verb croak, which sounds like what it is, and Old Norse kraka, crow, and our own word crow, too. English heron comes from a different root which is also imitative. Lucky for that wonderful gawky bird that his name has undergone a few elegant sound changes in the last two thousand years! If we had to name him all over again, I’m afraid we’d have to call him a gronk.

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