During Holy Week we will be sharing a mix of old and new at Word & Song. Here is our Word of the Week from 2023, palm. And we’ve got an Easter special for you as well: 20% off all upgrades, gift, and new subscriptions through April 15th. May God bless you all during the coming week and through Eastertide.
When man tries to understand the world around him, he often compares things to members of his own body. So if you have a steep hill or a cliff jutting out toward the sea, that’s the headland. When the Romans thought about the crater of a volcano, they called it the jaws, and I guess that makes sense, and besides, I’m not going to argue with them. We don’t have any volcanos where we live, but they had Vesuvius and Etna and Stromboli, after all. If you’re trying to remember what the heck a dactyl is, just remember that that comes from the Greek word for finger: stretch your finger out, and you’ll see one long joint and two short ones, and that’s exactly what a dactyl is: DUM-da-da. And then there’s our Word of the Week, the palm, a tree which the Romans named for the palma, the flat of your hand, because they thought that the long leaves looked like fingers.
If your name is PALMER (English), PALMEIRO (Spanish), PALMIERO (Italian), or PALMIER (French), you had an ancestor who traveled as a pilgrim to the Holy Land, and brought back palm branches, to commemorate Christ’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem, when the people shouted and sang, and strewed his path with the palms. And do we need any more evidence that people are fickle? Long before then, Jesus had the chance to give himself over to the love of the people, but he did not do it, because, as Saint John says, he knew what was in man, and did not need anyone to advise him about it. Sober words, to be sure.
But on the Sunday before Easter, at many Christian churches, you will have the blessing of the palms, and a processional entry into the church, followed by a full reading of the Passion. It’s a striking feast, Palm Sunday is, because you have both the joy and the sorrow, and we see that the kingship of Christ is not what the world easily understands. The King of Glory enters into his Passion: enters into the full manifestation of his love. And that is why, in English, we have come to say that a victor wins the palms, though when we say so we probably aren’t thinking about Jesus or Jerusalem.
You may wonder whether our word for the palm tree has anything to do with our word for the palm of your hand, and the answer is yes, they both come from the same Latin word, palma, meaning both things. Now, palma itself has cousins everywhere in our great family of languages, because the idea behind it is very common: it’s the idea of spreading something out flat. Something palam in Latin is right out in front, clear as day; we might say, it’s open-handed. Latin planum, flat, gives us plane, and when it goes through Italian, it gives us piano, meaning soft, gentle; the pianoforte, which is the instrument’s full name, could give you soft notes or strong notes, depending on how hard you struck the keys. Indo-European p became f in the Germanic languages, so the Old English word for the palm was folm, as when Grendel gobbled down one of Beowulf’s thanes and the last joints of the poor fellow went down the monster’s gullet, fet ond folma, feet and hands. Our word flat is a cousin too, along with field. A field does have to be pretty flat, if you’re going to plow it or play baseball on it.
But there is nothing, absolutely nothing, flat about Holy Week. It is all chasms and mountains of drama, the week when everything hidden, after having passed through utter darkness, comes into the light.
Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymn, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcast, alternately Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks. To support this project, please join us as a free or paid subscriber.
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