Tidings

Word of the Week

Have you ever heard a version of the carol “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” as it might have been sung in Shakespeare’s time?  The boisterous melody is in a major key, and the men I heard singing it belted it out as if they were in a public square, with wassail going all round:

O tidings, O tidings
Of comfort and joy!
For Jesus Christ our Savior
Was born upon this day.

They also sang it with what we can gather was the sixteenth century pronunciation, so they sounded like Australians transplanted to the mountains of Tennessee, and nothing at all like English schoolboys at Westminster.

Hans Memling, “The Advent and Triumph of Christ,” Hans Memling (1480). Public Domain.

Tidings is one of those old-fashioned words that you might use once a year for a special occasion, like the holiday that is approaching us now, and when you do use it, everyone understands both what you mean and why you are using it and not some more ordinary word.  It has passed from the current of time and change into the closest thing we get to linguistic immortality.  Oh, I’m not referring to words that are stable because we use them all the time, and the things they name don’t change.  I guess we’ll have dog in English as long as we have Man’s Best Friend!  And yet, strange to say, we don’t really know where that word comes from; the more common word in our family of languages gave the Greeks kynos and the Romans canis and the Welsh cu and us English-speakers hound.  But dog is still active and developing and acquiring meanings, while tidings is set for good, just as it is.

You don’t turn on the television set to get the tidings, not in English, anyway, though in German you do pick up the Zeitung, a very close cousin, to get them.  So we hope.  The Russians used to joke that there wasn’t any Pravda (Truth) in Izvestia (the News), or any Izvestia (News) in Pravda (the Truth).  You turn the set on to get the news, and that’s like and not like the tidings.  It’s like the tidings, because it has to do with things that happen in the tid – pronounce it like teed; it’s the Old English word for time.  Does it have to do with the tides?  Sure, or rather the tides have to do with it.  They didn’t borrow a word having to do with the ebb and flow of waves on the coast, and then apply it to time generally speaking.  They took the word that already referred to time, and they applied it to that regular flow of the waves.  We call them tides, so to speak, because you can tell the time by them: you can tell the tide.

In the days before digital clocks and everything else, people measured time by the lights in the sky, when they shone and where they rose and set, and how high in the sky they climbed.  So perhaps it was more natural for them to see time as involved in the whole world, from long ago to long hence.  If you were going to hear real tidings, then, they wouldn’t be about anything merely local or passing, like flies of a summer day.  We sense that tidings – as opposed to a scoop on what Wat the Miller was doing yesterday down by the mill pond – must be great, like the tides, and momentous, like the sun and moon, and mysterious, like the night sky.  It’s news, because we don’t expect it, but while the news is the same old same old chatter, the tidings may mark a divide in the world beneath our feet.  On one side, Herod is the king of the Jews, or pretends to be.  On the other – well, let us wait for the tidings!