The Language of Christmas

This week, I'm getting into the holiday spirit with — what else? — a look at the language of Christmas.

The Christmas season has a language all its own.

You can be happy at any time of year, but it seems this is the only time anyone ever feels merry.  On the flip side, the world, alas, is filled with crabs and curmudgeons year round, but the scrooges and grinches seem to turn up only around Christmas.  We hear of people singing, drinking, and carousing on New Year's Day, Memorial Day, and, well, just about any day, but we hear of them wassailing only now — and who ever heard of an Easter carol?

Fellow language lovers, I come to you today with my gift of the season: the etymologies of some common Christmas words and one familiar Christmas phrase.  (OK, this gift may not be as practical as a new iPad or as appetizing as a box of cookies, but just think what a hit you will be at the office Christmas party when you jump up on a desk and say, "Hark, I bring you tidings of linguistic joy.  O come, all ye merry folk as we wassail with words."  No, really, try it.)

Christmas, Scrooge, and Grinch

You don't have to be a lexicographer to figure out that the word Christmas comes partly from the word Christ, but did you know that Christmas, Scrooge, and Grinch all belong to the same category of words?  Because they all come at least partly from names, linguists call them eponyms.  Jesus Christ, Christians believe, was the son of God.  Ebenezer Scrooge is a character in A Christmas Carol, a novella by Charles Dickens, and the Grinch is a similarly sour character from a book by Dr. Seuss, How the Grinch Stole Christmas.  English has many eponyms, most of which have nothing to do with Christmas.  Some, such as Tommy John (as in "Tommy John surgery," often performed on baseball pitchers), are obvious; others are not.  For example, did you know that the word boycott comes from the name Charles Boycott?  I'll have much more to say about eponyms in a future column, which I kindly ask you not to boycott.

Merry

Like Christmas (or Cristes mæsse), the word merry goes all the way back to Old English.  In fact, our old friend King Alfred himself used the word in a translation of a work by Boethius: "þy ic nat hwæt þa wor[uldlustas] myrges bringað [heora lufigendum]." (I struggled to translate this sentence to Modern English while preserving merry as an adjective.  My literature colleague, friend, and go-to medievalist Dr. Roger Ladd kindly (and tentatively) offered this possible translation: "So I can’t get how the joys of the world make those who love them merry.")  If you didn't recognize the word merry in this quotation, you don't need to ask Santa for new reading glasses.  Words we use today often were spelled (and pronounced) differently in earlier stages of English.  Here, "myrges" is related to our modern merry.  For a variety of reasons (including, alas, the absence of dictionaries — what a dreary time that must have been), spelling was all over the map/mapp/mappe, especially in Middle English.  Earlier spellings of merry include — brace yourself: myrges, merge, myrge, myrige, meory, miri, mirie, miry, mirye, murȝe, muri, murie, muriȝe, mury, murye, mvrie, and myrgor.  (Thanks, OED!)  Medieval spelling bees must have been a case of anything goes.  Even little William Clark would have come home with a trophy.

The earliest quotations the OED provides for the sense "Of a season or festival: characterized by celebration and rejoicing. Frequently in Merry Christmas! and other seasonal greetings" come from the sixteenth century:

And thus our Lord send yow a mery Christenmas, and a comfortable, to yowr heart desyer. (letter by J. Fisher, 1534)

And thus I comytt you to god, who send you a mery Christmas & many. (letter by J. Scudamore, 1565)

What made Christmas merry?  Something called wassailing surely played a role.

Wassail

Wassail is a word for word lovers.  If this were a linguistics class, I could teach a half-dozen or so concepts, from borrowing to functional shift, by examining different aspects of this word's history.  I will contain myself here.  (You're welcome.)

Although you probably would never guess it, wassail evolved from a pair of words meaning "Be well."  In Old Norse, the source of many English words because of the presence of the "Danes," or "Vikings" in England during the medieval era, ves heill meant be healthy.  In English, ves heill became wæs hæil, washayl, and eventually wassail.  According to an account by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his History of the Kings of Britain, an episode in the life of the fifth-century British leader Vortigern, gave rise to a particular tradition of toasting:

While Vortigern was being entertained at a royal banquet, the girl Renwein came out of an inner room carrying a golden goblet full of wine. She walked up to the King, curtsied low, and said "Lavert King, was hail!" When he saw the girl's face, Vortigern was greatly struck by her beauty and was filled with desire for her. He asked his interpreter what it was that the girl had said and what he ought to reply to her. "She called you Lord King and did you honour by drinking your health. What you should reply is 'drinc hail.'" Vortigern immediately said the words "drinc hail" and ordered Renwein to drink. Then he took the goblet from her hand, kissed her and drank in his turn. From that day to this, the tradition has endured in Britain that the one who drinks first at a banquet says "was hail" and he who drinks next says "drinc hail.'"

I can't vouch for this story, since historians of previous eras weren't always fastidious when it came to historical evidence, but I can say that there developed in England a tradition of "wassailing," as this note from Merriam-Webster explains:

In medieval England, a courteous host would offer a cup to a guest and toast them with the salutation wæs hæil, or "be in good health."  The guest would accept the cup and respond with drinc hæil, "drink in good health." Soon, wassail was also being applied to the party at which the wassail was offered, as well as the actual drink passed around.

Now, this kind of thing can get out of hand, if you can believe it.  Today, one of the definitions in the Merriam-Webster entry for the noun wassail is "riotous drinking."  In short, a toast to one's health has evolved into something that could make your health, well, toast.

Carol

If only all those wassailers had focused on their carols instead of the contents of their wassail bowls . . .

Back in the fourteenth century, when speakers of Middle English referred to a carol, they could be referring to a number of related things.  One meaning is a "ring-dance with accompaniment of song," as the entry in the Oxford English Dictionary reads.  Among the several illustrative quotations in the OED entry is this one from the medieval poem Arthour & Merlin: "Miri time it is in may..Damsels carols ledeth" (It is a merry time in May. . . . Damsels lead carols."  Back then, apparently, one could be merry in May, not merely in December.)  According to the OED, the word could also refer to a "Diversion or merry-making of which such dances formed a leading feature" and, yes, "A song; originally, that to which they danced."  The first and third meanings survived for centuries.  Indeed, Shakespeare used the word in the sense of a song in this line from As You Like It: "This Carroll they began that houre, / With a hey and a ho, & a hey nonino."

Well, that's one way to sing a carol.  Remember, the next time you are wassailing "In the Bleak Mid-Winter" and it feels a little too bleak, try to work in a hey, a ho, and, especially, a hey nonino.  In my experience, that last one is a real crowd-pleaser.

It apparently took a while for the word carol to be applied to Christmas music.  The first illustrative quotation the OED provides for the meaning of "A song or hymn of joy sung at Christmas in celebration of the Nativity" comes from 1502: "Item to Cornishe for setting of a carralle upon Cristmas day" (Privy Purse Expenses of Elizabeth of York).  In fact, as carols go, the specifically Christmas carol was a late bloomer.  An article from the University of Plymouth features this observation:

Carols used to be written and sung during all four of the seasons. There used to be May carols and harvest carols, but it is only the tradition of singing them at Christmas which has really survived.

That's a shame.  If there's any time that could use some lively carols, it's the bleak mid-winter of January and February in Indiana, where I live.  There are days when we could use some heys, hos, and hey noninos.

O come all ye

You probably know these words from the opening of a famous Christmas carol:

O come, all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant, O come ye, O come ye to Bethlehem!

Like many other Christmas words and phrases, "O come all ye" has an archaic ring to it.  For one thing, "ye" is a very old form of a second-person pronoun.  We see it in other famous phrases such as "O ye of little faith."  I will spare you the arcane details — this is supposed to be a gift, after all — but let me add that the "ye" in the ridiculous combination "ye olde" is something totally different — the result of a misreading of a runic letter called a thorn.)

The "O" also sounds archaic or at least poetic.  It sounds like the modern interjection "oh," but it's actually different.  Our modern "oh" is typically informal, suggesting excitement or a casual attitude — as in "Oh, I can't wait to look up the etymology of that word!" or "Oh, don't worry about buying me a big-screen TV.  I'm happy just reading my dictionary."  The older "O," on the other hand, often preceded nouns used as vocatives (that is, phrases used to address someone).

We don't hear "O come all ye" all that much these days, except during the Christmas season, but "Come all ye" was so prevalent in earlier times that A Handbook to Literature contains an entry for it and describes it as "A type of song, usually anonymous, with 'come all ye' at the beginning or in a refrain or moralizing conclusion."  If the idea of a genre build around a phrase is hard to wrap your mind around, imagine that "Hey, Jude" was just one of many songs beginning with "Hey . . ."  The Beatles classic was a No. 1 hit, after all.  It's a wonder that other bands didn't try "Hey, Stan" or "Hey, Clara."

There's nothing like a host of heavenly etymologies to generate some holiday spirit.  If you find yourself surrounded by Scrooges and Grinches this Christmas season, you could try to make them merry with some wassailing and O come all ye carols, or you could just pull out your dictionary — you do carry one on you like a vade mecum, right? — and wow them with words. Just make sure two of those words are hey nonino.