I often say to people, when I’m talking about my wonderful and many-talented wife Debra, “If it weren’t for her, I’d be living under a bridge!” Or worse than that. I see now that the Lord had been working in mysterious ways for each of us. Where are you going to find somebody who’s smart, who loves languages and literature, and who treasures families with a lot of aunts and uncles and cousins? Who comes from your own neck of the woods? Who sings hymns, and prays to the Lord God? Who is lovely, body and soul? That’s what I found when I met Debra, way back in 1985, at Chapel Hill, when she and I were grad students teaching composition to freshmen, and we both knew that for the most part it couldn’t really be done. That’s because we both learned to write by reading good books, not by studying rules from a textbook. And we’ve grown together over the years, closer and closer.
Our Word of the Week was important for Debra, in one way in particular. The Hebrew name Dawid means loving or beloved, and that’s what we named our son. Our daughter Jessica we named also thinking of the Hebrew: her name was coined by Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice, for the girl who leaves her father Shylock and marries a young and amiable Christian man, Lorenzo. Jessica is Shakespeare’s turning of Yitzhak (Isaac) into a girl’s name, so as to play upon the root of that name, which has to do with laughter. So in my family we’ve got me (my name’s origin is unclear), Debra the busy bee (from Hebrew devorah, bee), Jessica the laughing, and David the beloved.
What’s the difference between someone who is loved and someone who is beloved? In the film The Cowboys, when the boys who have made it all the way to Kansas City with their drove of cattle order a headstone for Wil Anderson — that’s John Wayne’s part, he’s murdered along the way, then avenged by the boys — and they don’t know what to put on it, the engraver suggests, “Beloved husband and father.” “That’ll do,” say the boys. Beloved suggests not just affection, but a love that cherishes, that holds dear, that prizes — which is what “dear” means, actually. You may love many people, but it would be hard to say that each one of them is beloved by you, and when we use the word as a noun, we imply that there’s only one, as Debra is my beloved. Jesus loved all his disciples, but for the one we call the beloved disciple, John, he felt the strongest bond of friendship. Or when we use the definite article before the word, and name “The Beloved,” we Christians are talking only about Jesus.
There are three parts to our word: the prefix be-, the suffix -ed, and the verb at the heart of it, love. Let’s start with the suffix. In early English, there were three ways to make the past tense of a “weak” verb, meaning a verb that formed its past tense by appending something extra, a dental suffix. Those were -ed, -d, or -t, usually -ed (but see burnt, met, felt, kept, fed, and many others). Now, the -ed was pronounced as its own syllable. Over time, whenever it was possible, the vowel dropped out and the -d was assimilated to the previous vowel or consonant. If it’s a vowel or a voiced consonant (b, g, j, l, m, n, ng, r, th as in bathe, v, z), the sound is d, also voiced. If it’s an unvoiced consonant (f, k, p, s, sh), the sound is t, unvoiced. Feel your vocal cords when you make those sounds: they vibrate for the voiced ones, and they don’t for the unvoiced. But for some words, when we kept a strong sense of the -ed word as an adjective and not a past participle, we continued pronouncing it as a separate syllable: ragged, wretched, peaked, blessed, cursed, a few others, and beloved.
Then there’s the be- prefix. It used to be much commoner than it is now, but even now there are probably about 100 verbs, adjectives, and prepositions that have it, and among these are some of our most frequently used words: before, behind, become, beware, believe. Others have a sense of the old-fashioned about them: betide, befall, behest, betake. The prefix has three general functions or suggestions. It’s a causative, as when you besmear somebody (and it’s usually a negative for this function, as in bedevil, bewitch). Or it’s an intensifier, as when your ship is becalmed, which isn’t just calm; it’s stuck on the sea, going nowhere, as was the ship of the Ancient Mariner. Or it suggests that you’re by somebody or something, roundabout, near, over, across, as someone is when he’s standing beside you, at your side.
Of course the most important part of the word is love. We all know what that means, don’t we? Well — European poets spent several hundred years exploring the meaning of love, because a lot of things go by that name, including many an impostor. But the root of the word shows up everywhere in our big family of languages: Russian lyubov, love; Latin lubet, it pleases, it delights, Sanskrit lubh, to desire. But my favorite of the descendants? It’s the pair we get in German: lieben, to love, and loben, to praise. It is a praise to praise, when thou art praised, says Philip Sidney’s starry-eyed lover Astrophil to his beloved Stella. Debra is my beloved, and I say that in praise.
