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What a crazy language English is!
I used to tell my students that they should never use a thesaurus, unless they already knew the meaning of the word they wanted to look up, but somehow it had escaped their minds. It’s especially dangerous in English, because we’ve got a lot of words from three different but often intermingling sources: from the ancient Germanic, from medieval French, and directly from words adopted or coined from Latin (and, to a much lesser extent, Greek). Even within one source, there are often what are called “doublets,” the same basic word that was pronounced differently in the north of England than in the south, or in some other geographical or ethnic divisions, which then became separate words with close but distinct meanings: drag, draw; tug, tow; bow, bough; shirt, skirt; ditch, dike; sweet, soothe; stamp, stomp; champ, chomp; and many more. Let’s think about this for a moment, taking for example English words for a simple idea, that of bigness: big, large, huge, great, enormous, vast, humongous, immense, massive, gross. Those words are hardly interchangeable! Even the two closest words, big (of unknown origin in England) and large (from Norman French), can’t be switched so easily. Helen may be a big woman on the committee, meaning that she’s important, but if you call her a large woman on the committee, your hearer may have a picture in his mind of Helen sitting on the committee, and when she sits on it, it isn’t going anywhere! An elephant is massive, but you’d never call it vast, which has to do with extent, such as from star to star. George Washington at Valley Forge was resolute, and that’s good, but General Howe in Philadelphia was stolid, and that was not good at all — not for his army, anyway.
So it is with our Word of the Week, weary, fit for the season that ends the year, if you look on things with a certain resignation. If you say, “I’m tuckered out,” you may be weary, but it’s more likely that you’ve just been shoveling two feet of snow out of your 60-foot driveway, and your arms are sore. The expression may even have something jovial about it. If you say, “I’m exhausted,” maybe you’ve spent the last 10 hours scraping shingles off the roof, and though there’s nothing jovial about that, you’re mainly referring to your body, not to your soul. And there are colloquial ways of saying these things, usually with a comic touch: American pooped, British knackered, and so on.
But with weary we hover between the body and the soul. You don’t get weary from a day’s work, because one day of hard labor is not going to touch your soul. Jack London’s got a story, “The Apostate,” in which a young man who has been laboring assiduously, like a human machine, in the textile mills since he was a small boy suddenly finds himself no longer willing to work — and he no longer cares about the welfare of his mother or his siblings. He says, basically, “I’m not going back, and I don’t care.” He is weary: the many gray years have gotten to him, and I’d say that such a person, without the grace of God, is never going to revive again.
One of the signs of weariness is that you don’t care if you ever feast again, because you don’t feel you have anything to feast about. The converse is true also. Unless you celebrate the feast, and that means unless you know in your inmost heart that there is reason to feast, you will grow weary. If you don’t feast, you may be irritably busy, like a human hamster on an endless wheel, or like the mechanized human being in London’s story. Or you may be listless and sluggardly. Either way we’ve got neither rest nor real energetic labor nor feasting, but something like radio static played at full volume. Silence and song are related; noise is different. Feasting and resting are related; weariness is different. So we are looking forward with anticipatory joy to the feast that’s coming very soon!
On the word itself: it’s from Anglo-Saxon, and it’s got close kin in other Germanic languages. There’s a nice compound that shows up once, slaepwerig, “sleep-weary,” that is, weary from lack of sleep. It’s in a riddle-poem in a book of such (Tolkien did not invent riddle-poems!). One of the clues is that “Often a man or maiden comes to greet me, sleep-weary.” The consensus is that the answer to the riddle is, “A millstone!” Does that mean that the millstone, turned by a water-wheel, was running all night long? I don’t know, but that would certainly weary you, wouldn’t it? We’re not sure where the root comes from. But the -ig part is easy. It makes an adjective out of a noun or a verb. It’s the same suffix you’ve got in Greek -ik(os), in Latin -ic(us), German -isch and -ig, and now modern English -ish and -y. The suffix is quite alive and productive still. Any English speaker will immediately understand a made-up word like painterish or pillowy. Think of all the -y words we make up from animals: doggy, catty, horsy, clammy, fishy, goosey.
Stay with us, dear Readers! We aren’t going to drop off by the wayside!
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