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Michael Quinion |
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Michael Quinion has spent the past forty years struggling with the English language and considers he has now fought it to a draw. He has written almost every sort of text except obituaries and sports reports, having been variously a BBC radio reporter and features producer, writer and director of audio-visual programmes for museums and visitor centres, a museum curator, an exhibition script writer, and heritage interpreter.
For the past decade he has been a field researcher and advisor to the Oxford English Dictionary, writer of much of the second edition of the Oxford Dictionary of New Words, and author of Ologies and Isms: a Dictionary of Affixes (OUP). He is perhaps best known as writer and editor of the email newsletter and website, both called World Wide Words, which feature the idiosyncrasies and oddities of our language.
Linguist Michael Quinion has spent the past forty years struggling with the English language and considers he has now fought it to a draw. In his new book, Port Out, Starboard Home: And Other Language Myths, Quinion offers explanations of why and how stories about words are created, and how misunderstanding word origins - while usually harmless - can have serious consequences. Here he demonstrates how words linked to the festive season show how diffuse the roots of English are.
Christmas, though Old English, is formed from Christ + mass, both parts of which are Latin, though Christ is originally Greek (from an adjective meaning "anointed"). Noel, a poetic term of carols and Christmas cards, was borrowed in that form from French in the early nineteenth century (though in the spelling nowel, a word that was shouted or sung to commemorate the birth of Christ, it's known from the fourteenth century); in either spelling it can be traced back to Latin natalis, birth. Boxing day is a native British term of Victorian times, originally for the collection box taken around to customers by a firm's apprentices on 26 December to solicit seasonal gifts.
The Scots new year festival, hogmanay, got its name from French only in the early seventeenth century, perhaps from the Old French aguillanneuf, "last day of the year, new year's gift". Father Christmas is obvious enough, but his other name, Santa Claus, was first formed in the United States under eighteenth-century Dutch influence from the dialect Sante Klass, meaning St Nicholas; his day was at first celebrated on 6 December but later moved to Christmas Day.
Yule was known in English before the Norman Conquest as an alternative name for Christmas Day - it was borrowed from Old Norse. One tradition was to burn a Yule log, a ceremony often accompanied by drinking a wassail health, from Middle English words meaning "be in good health!"; it's an Old Norse expression introduced to England by Danish-speaking invaders but soon naturalised. If you would like to perpetuate the custom, the correct response is drinkhail, "drink good health!".
