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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?”
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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