High

A long time ago, when we were living in Rhode Island, a couple of boys lived in the house across the street, with their parents and a their sisters. There was a grassy fenced-in area above the parking lot, where the kids sometimes played, and while I was pulling the weeds out of our gardens I heard great shouts of boyish laughter coming from over there. So I went to see what they were doing. They had three cinderblocks, a plank of wood, and a Barbie doll. Use your imaginations, my friends!

“We’re playing High-flyin’ Barbie!” they said. The idea was simple. They positioned the plank over one cinderblock, then they set Barbie on one end, while they dropped a cinderblock on the other. Barbie flew very high in the air, but they couldn’t get her to go far forward, not so as to clear the fence, about fifty feet away. After I got over my uncontrollable spasms of laughter, I said, “Well, boys, we’ve got to shorten the distance between Barbie and the center of the cinderblock under here, and make the plank longer on the other end, so that the angle changes. But that means that we’ll need two cinderblocks to give her enough force.” So I took two blocks and raised them head-high and dropped them — bang, zoom! Barbie cleared the fence by twenty feet on a line drive, and the boys cheered like crazy. Then I left them to their high-jinks.

Our Word of the Week, high, is remarkably fruitful of compounds and figures of speech, as I believe comparable words are in other human languages. Its physical and symbolic forces often come together, just like the cinderblock, the plank, and the doll. Man stands upright, so that he can look outward and upward, to things high in the sky, and that attests his nobility. But he’d better watch out, lest he pretend to be all high and mighty, which invites a come-uppance or a slap-down, which strangely appear to mean the same thing. The Greek word for that attitude was hubris, what in a folksy English dialect you might call being uppity.

Sometimes high describes physical position, as compared with lower things: so we have high noon, when the sun reaches its peak in the day, or a highboy, that odd piece of furniture on raised legs. Sometimes the sense has to do with greatness of being, as when the ancient Hebrews named God ‘Elyon, translated in English as Most High. Yet sometimes the word, as in Italian alto and French haut, can suggest depth, even in a threatening or pejorative sense, as in the phrases high crimes and high treason — French, haute trahison. Or we say that we’re determined to get something done against all obstacles, come hell or high water.

But more often than not, we think of things that are high as noble, worthy, or excellent. We hang the flag high in honor of our country, but at half-mast only on days of mourning. The immensely daring and playful builders of the great Gothic cathedrals found out how to build regular lace-works of stone and glass rising so high above the earth, it yet strikes us with wonder that they could accomplish a bit of it without calculus, computer simulations, synthetic construction materials, and enormous diesel-powered cranes. We hold our heroes, or we should hold them, in high esteem, and a high feast day is one of the most joyful or solemn in the calendar. German has the fine word Hochzeit, literally High-Time or High-Tide, meaning wedding day.

As for high jinks — it was a Scottish forfeit-game! Everybody who got chosen by the dice or by turns had to pull off some silly stunt, perhaps involving jumping or dancing or other bodily jinks, meaning jumps or jerks, and if you couldn’t do it, you had to suffer the comical penalty. Yes, maybe it involved drinking Scotch; I don’t know — high spirits, they’d say.

As for the word, it’s spelled high because there really was a guttural sound at the end of it, a light sound, still preserved in German hoch, high. To turn the adjective into a noun, you’d add the suffix -th, to get highth, just like length, breadth, width, and depth. The pronunciation with a t won out in the end, though for five or six centuries highth and h(e)ight battled it out pretty evenly. Its cousins that we know of are almost all in the Germanic languages: German hoch, as I’ve said, but also Dutch hoge, so if you meet somebody with the last name Hogeboom, it doesn’t have to do with pigs or loud noises: it means High-Tree, like the boom on a ship.

Koln Cathedral, postcard. Public Domain.

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magaine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymns, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcast for paid subscribers, alternately Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks. Paid subscribers also receive audio-enhanced posts and on-demand access to our full archive, and may add their comments to our posts and discussions. To support this project, please join us as a free or paid subscriber. We value all of our subscribers, and we thank you for reading Word and Song!