Look Both Ways Before You Cross
- Mark Canada
- Jan 3
- 7 min read
If you have been reading Mind Travel over the last year, you know that I love language and new beginnings. This week, I bring the two together in an article on the word that English speakers use for the first month of the year.
Can words, all by themselves, carry insights into the nature of things?
Henry David Thoreau seemed to think so. In Walden, he wrote at length about, of all things, the word lobe. Now, unless you happen to be talking about ears, you probably don't use this word much or even think much about it, but Thoreau thought about it a lot. Indeed, I'm pretty sure he carried his analysis too far, wandering off into some linguistic fantasy land.*
In imagining that language can carry truth, however, Thoreau was onto something.
A Name and a Mascot for the Beginning of the Year
You may already know that many English words for the months of the year came from words used in ancient times. March, for example, comes from Mars, the name the Romans used for their god of war, and August comes from Augustus, a name applied to the leader Octavian after he became the first Roman emperor in 27 B.C.
A reluctance to use month and day names associated with pagan gods such as Mars and Thor (the name that gave us Thursday) is the reason why some Quakers once used numbers for months and days. Now you know why Walt Whitman, who was raised by a Quaker mother, wrote lines such as these in "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry": "I too many and many a time cross’d the river of old, / Watch’d the Twelfth-month sea-gulls—I saw them high in the air, floating with motionless wings, oscillating their bodies . . . ."
Now is a good time for us to consider the origin of January, since we — at least those of us using the Gregorian calendar — are about to enter this month. (Although we all occupy the same planet making the same circuit around the sun, some people around the world mark the time in different ways. The Gregorian calendar, established by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582, is commonly used in the United States and elsewhere.)
The origin of the word January is the Roman god Janus. In terms of prominence, Janus lags well behind Mars, Juno, and Saturn. He was, after all, not a god of war or the wife, sister, or father of Jupiter, the head of the gods. Rather, he was, according to Encyclopedia Britannica, the "animistic spirit of doorways (januae) and archways (jani)." That puts him, let's see, somewhere between the spirits of gutters and the nymphs of baseboards.
Janus, however, had something that separated him from many other gods, something that brought him a certain amount of star power: he had two faces. This is the kind of thing that professional wrestlers today would kill for — or, at least, pin for — because, I mean, come on, talk about a slick schtick. Imagine being able to frown and smile at the same time or flirt with one and repel with the other. It's golden!
Anyway, all of these features made Janus the perfect mascot for the first month of the year.
The Door of Opportunity
Here, then, is where the truth lies — and provides us with a helpful opportunity to improve our lives and our world.
Let's begin with the domain of Janus. While having a spirit oversee something as seemingly mundane as a doorway might strike many of us today as strange and even humorous, the threshold of a building is packed with metaphorical significance. It is, after all, the point in space between two places. When we pass through doorways, we enter new physical, even cultural or emotional realms. If you think I'm carrying this idea too far, just think of the last time you walked into . . .
a house in a different country,
a synagogue, mosque, church, or temple for a religion foreign to you,
an ethnic grocery,
or even a bedroom inhabited — and decorated — by your teenager.
Doorways — and, for that matter, windows — can carry weight in my world of literature. I still remember, all these years later, that one of my mentors in graduate school had written about "liminality," a term that can refer literally to lines and specifically to thresholds. The title of one of his articles is "Liminality in 'The Turn of the Screw.'" (If you don't know this novella by Henry James, I highly recommend it — and, please, forget about the film adaptations. Read the story!) A doorway can suggest separation, as well as connection. It really is a fascinating thing to contemplate.
Then there are those two faces. Janus can look two directions at once. The act of seeing is itself both literally and metaphorically powerful. Seeing is the way that most of us perceive the world around us, and, for this reason, we often use the word see as a synonym for understand, as in "Ah, I see" or "I don't see why they oppose this bill." If you could see two directions at once, as Janus can, you could take in more information, understand more, even — if your brain is capable — comprehend two very different things at the same time — say, the charms of both winter and summer, the insights and values of different ideologies, the glory that is Carolina and the travesty that is Duke. (OK, that last one might betray some personal bias.)
Janus, in short, may be two-faced, but he doesn't have to be a liar. Maybe he's just doubly perceptive.
What Janus Can Teach Us
Through his namesake January, Janus has remained with us English speakers for thousands of years. (He shows up in other languages, such as Spanish and French, as well.) What can we learn from him — or, rather, from his presence in the name of our first month?
For starters, it's worth remembering that moving from December of one year to January of the next constitutes a transition — from one year to another, of course, but also, potentially from one state of being to another. This is, of course, why New Year's resolutions have become a thing. As we cross the threshold from one year to another, many of us strive to remake some aspect of ourselves, perhaps by changing our eating or exercising habits, for example.
In this sense, remembering Janus — specifically the thresholds he oversaw as a spirit of doorways and archways — can help us become better versions of ourselves. As you enter the new world of 2026, think of yourself as walking into a new realm, one in which you can do more for yourself and the people around you. When you walk into a different room or a different building, you are the same person, but you have a new opportunity to learn, to act, and just to be. The same is true of "walking into" a new year.
The two faces of Janus are a helpful reminder, as well. For one thing, they suggest looking backward and forward. Before you look forward to what you want to be or do in 2026, it can be quite helpful to look backward at 2025. What can you learn from both your successes and your failures? If you want to create more peace in your life and world (a priority for me), consider what you said or did that led to peace and, perhaps more importantly, what led to conflict. You might find you can go a long way toward achieving your goal by simply doing more of the former and less of the latter.
Those same two faces carry another powerful message, one that can help you if you happen to share my goal of creating more peace. I'll have more to say on that front next week.
In the meantime, I hope you will consider the truth sometimes hidden in words, particularly the transformative truths right there in January, a word that can help us to face the future, see both it and the past better, and cross the threshold into a better realm for yourself and the people around you.
Note
Maintaining resolutions is hard, but they can be powerful if managed strategically. I have written several articles about New Year's — and even Old Year's — resolutions. Click on the links below for some thoughts that might help you succeed in transforming your life and world for the better.
* In a chapter called "Spring," Thoreau ponders phenomena he has encountered in nature — particularly leaves — and expounds upon a theory about a lobe, both the thing and the word:
You find thus in the very sands an anticipation of the vegetable leaf. No wonder that the earth expresses itself outwardly in leaves, it so labors with the idea inwardly. The atoms have already learned this law, and are pregnant by it. The overhanging leaf sees here its prototype. Internally, whether in the globe or animal body, it is a moist thick lobe, a word especially applicable to the liver and lungs and the leaves of fat, (λείβω, labor, lapsus, to flow or slip downward, a lapsing; λοβος, globus, lobe, globe; also lap, flap, and many other words,) externally a dry thin leaf, even as the f and v are a pressed and dried b. The radicals of lobe are lb, the soft mass of the b (single lobed, or B, double lobed,) with the liquid l behind it pressing it forward. In globe, glb, the guttural g adds to the meaning the capacity of the throat.
Thoreau was a brilliant writer — one of my favorites, in fact — but, as a linguist, he could be fanciful. In making his case for the philosophical truth in the words lobe and globe, I'm pretty sure he got a little carried away with his analysis of sounds, letters, and maybe more. I'm not even sure what exactly he's implying when he suggests that "f and v are a pressed and dried b," but I'm pretty sure it has no grounding in phonetics or historical linguistics. The first two sounds, as Thoreau probably knew, are what modern linguists call labiodental fricatives, meaning that they are made by pressing the upper front teeth against the lower lip and allowing air to flow, with friction, through this part of the mouth. The b sound is known as a bilabial stop because — you guessed it — we use both upper and lower lips to stop the flow of air. In short, all three sounds involve the lower lip. Two — v and b — involve vibrating the vocal chords. That's it. As far as I know, there's nothing about an f or a v that makes it a "pressed and dried" version (whatever that is) of b.
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