906. A'wassailing. Noel. Mistletoe. Trolling the ancient Yuletide carol, and more. We look into the wonderful words of Christmas and their origins — as delightful as a Christmas cookie.
906. A'wassailing. Noel. Mistletoe. Trolling the ancient Yuletide carol, and more. We look into the wonderful words of Christmas and their origins — as delightful as a Christmas cookie. You'll be shouting "drink-hail!" forevermore.
| Transcript: https://grammar-girl.simplecast.com/episodes/wonderful-words-of-christmas/transcript
The first segment was written by Kate Burridge and Howard Manns from Monash University. It appears here through a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and you can think of me as your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff. Today, we’ll talk about a whole bunch of Christmas-related words.
by Kate Burridge and Howard Manns
“Kondo-ing” (de-cluttering) has become all the rage. But languages are hoarders that hang onto every used bit of clothing, threadbare cushion or musty old piece of luggage. You never know, these might be useful one day.
Christmas is a great reminder of how important it is to hang onto some old stuff – decorations stowed in closets, dusty words lingering in our brains. At Christmas, we drag out boxes of tinsel, baubles and fairy lights. We also trot out words, meanings and even grammar that we stopped using in our everyday language long ago.
So, let’s unpack this dusty box of Christmas lexical curiosities. We’ll toll trolls, blaze yules, graze mules, and then finish with a Christmas cracker of a linguistic joke. (Well, it’s no worse than any other you’ll hear this holiday season!)
Untangling and dusting off these lexical curiosities – like those Christmas lights we haphazardly stowed the year before – takes some work. We needn’t go further than the lyrics of our favorite carols to see this. For example, the puzzling line (in Deck the Halls) that instructs us to “troll the ancient yuletide carol.”
Trolls sound scary. If they’re not leaving offensive messages on the internet, they’re giants living in Tolkien’s Middle-earth. But the gentle trolling we do at Christmas has a different (French) origin. It entered English in the 14th century meaning “to stroll” – but taking a few twists and turns, as words can do, it eventually arrived at another meaning “to sing merrily in full voice” (think of those rousing trolly-lollies).
The references to “yuletide” and “the blazing yule before us” are equally bewildering. “Tide” here has nothing to do with flows of water, but preserves the original meaning “season” or “time.” “Yule” like “tide” is one the oldest English Christmas words (8th century), but its meaning has shifted dramatically – from the original name for December or January (and presumably the pagan festivities around then), its meaning morphed into “Christmastide” a century later.
The opening line of the carol “God rest you merry, gentlemen” also dusts the cobwebs off some linguistic junk. Basically, it’s a good wish and means something like “happiness to you gentlemen.” It doesn’t help that the verb rest here has nothing to do with “relaxing” but means “keep”; what’s more, it appears in a grammatical form that no longer exists. The old subjunctive signaled non-real events, such as wishing. This job is now done by other verbs (like “may”) – so, a more modern version would be “May God keep you merry, gentleman!”
But even “merry” isn’t terribly common these days. Putting aside euphemistic references to alcohol-induced states of cheerfulness, we usually only encounter “merry” in carol lyrics like this one, and of course in the expression “Merry Christmas” (and perhaps also Robin Hood’s band of merry men).
Whenever untangling and dusting off our Christmas curiosities gets too hard, we can turn the task over to kids. They often refashion these yuletide curiosities into something that seems a bit more reasonable. “Tolling the yuletide carol” has a much jollier image than “trolling” it, and “get dressed, you married gentlemen” would seem like good advice. Certainly a “grazing mule before us” makes a lot more sense than that “blazing yule.”
But it probably wasn’t children who “decked the halls with Buddy Holly.” In fact, adults are responsible for a lot of remodeled Christmas expressions, and they’ve been doing it for centuries.
Look at “mistletoe.” It has absolutely nothing to do with toes, though this seems quite reasonable when you look at the plant, especially hanging as decoration. In fact “mistletoe” grew out of “misteltan,” the plant name combined with the earlier “tan” (“twig”).
Despite their appearance, reindeer have nothing to do with reins (“harness”). “Reindeer” was the original Viking word for this animal “hreinn” combined with “deer,” which simply meant “creature” (so “(h)reindeer” was one of those redundant compounds like “oaktree”).
Words we’ve purloined from other languages are especially prone to these linguistic makeovers. Look what we’ve done to “Kris Kringle” – it’s come a mighty long way from the German dialect word “Christkindel” (meaning “Christ child”).
We sometimes find a cracked bauble or two in our box of lexical curiosities, but we’re loath to toss them out. We just keep using them or find new uses for them. Plum puddings don’t have plums in them anymore – the dried plums were replaced by raisins, but we’ve kept the name.
As foodie John Ayto describes, traditional Christmas fare had all sorts of “plum” dishes, even plum broth and plum porridge. Occasionally modern plum puddings become “plump puddings” – time will tell whether this catches on.
So what about Boxing Day with no boxes (unless you’ve been to those post Christmas sales)? In the 17th century, Christmas boxes were earthenware containers taken around on the first weekday after Christmas. The purpose was to collect money for the workers and, like piggy banks, they were then broken and the money distributed.
Clearly, the events around this seasonal payment have changed dramatically and “box” now refers to a day, not a container – the day has shifted too, and fixed on December 26.
Our box of Christmas curiosities is overflowing, but we refuse to Kondo any of it! We so want to dazzle you with stories about “hark,” “a’wassailing,” “noel” – even the unappetizing though intriguing historical links between the words “pudding” and “botulism.”
Instead, we ask you to pull on the end of our Christmas cracker, and share in a daggy linguistic joke:
What do we call Santa’s little helpers?
Subordinate clauses
We wish you a conjubilant holiday, meaning one “filled with good cheer but most especially the good cheer that comes from being in the company of others.”
That segment was written by Kate Burridge and Howard Manns, Professor of Linguistics and Senior lecturer in Linguistics, respectively, and both at Monash University.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
by Mignon Fogarty
And of course, I couldn’t let those four teasers go at the end, so I did some research myself.
The words for pudding and botulism are connected because pudding was originally not the sweet, creamy concoction we get from the same people who make Jell-O. It actually wasn’t a custard-like treat until 1896, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. For much, much longer — from the 1300s — pudding was a kind of sausage. Etymonline says one possible origin of the word “pudding” is from the French word “boudin,” which means “sausage.” The B somehow became a P, and voila, you get a word that sounds a lot like “pudding.”
Botulism, which today refers to sickness from any food that wasn’t properly preserved, was first noticed after people ate, you guessed it, bad sausage! And the word “botulism” comes from the same Latin root, “botulus,” that gave the French the word “boudin,” which probably gave us the word “pudding.” So that’s how the words “pudding” and “botulism” are related.
“Noel” came from a Latin word that meant “to be born” and also gives us the words “natal,” as in “the neonatal ward at a hospital,” and “nativity,” as in “the nativity scene.”
“Noel” became associated with Christmas because of the idea that that was the day Jesus was born, and going back to the 1300s, it was also a name given to people who were born or baptized on Christmas day.
“Hark” isn’t that interesting. It comes from an Old English word that meant “to listen,” but “wassailing” is lots of fun! The only place you’re likely to hear it now is in the Christmas carol “Here we come a-wassailing, among the leaves so green.”
Well, the “hail” part goes back to an Old Norse word that meant “healthy” or “to be healthy.” And in Old English, “wes” was a form of the verb “to be.” So “wes hál” meant “be healthy,” and it was something you said to someone when you gave them a drink or you toasted them. You’d say “wassail,” meaning something like “to your health,” and then the standard, courteous, customary reply was “drink-hail,” meaning “drink good health” or “good luck.” It was a call-and-response: Wassail! Drink-hail! And then the Old Norse also had “sit-hail,” which meant “sit in good health.”
And then from there, from wassail/drink-hail, it wasn’t a huge leap for the drink itself that was offered in good health to start being called “wassail.” And the OED says it seems the name was particularly applied to spiced ale used in Twelfth-Night and Christmas-Eve celebrations throughout the 1600s, during which people were said to drink from the wassail-bowl. So that seems to be the first association with Christmas.
Shakespeare has the first citation that uses “wassail” to mean carousing or reveling, and then in the early or mid-1600s, it was first used to actually describe a song or carol. For example, there’s a book from around 1650 titled “New Christmas Carols, Carrol for Wassel-Bowl,” and it includes the line “Good Dame here at your Door Our Wassel we begin.” So those carolers probably had drinks with them.
And then Etymonline says it was in 1742 that wassailing came to mean the “custom of going caroling house to house at Christmas time.” The earliest record of the Christmas carol we still hear, “Here we come a-wassailing,” is from the mid-1800s, but people seem to think it is probably older than that.
So the next time I serve Christmas drinks, I’m going to deliver them with a “Wassail!” and encourage my guests to reply with “Drink-hail!”
And then, when I was researching “wassailing” and went down the rabbit hole of Twelfth Night, I learned that the Twelve Days of Christmas are NOT the 12 days leading up to Christmas, but are instead the 12 days starting on Christmas and going to January 5th (or 6th depending on how you count). This blew my mind, so I asked a bunch of my friends and family if they knew this and was pretty relieved that most of them didn’t because I was worried that maybe I was the only one who didn’t know!
Only two people knew for sure, and one of them works for a large international corporation and tells me this 12-day period is a bigger deal in Europe than it is in the United States and that sometimes she can’t schedule meetings with people on January 6 because it’s a Christian religious holiday — Epiphany, also sometimes called Three Kings’ Day because it’s the day the three wise men are said to have visited Jesus. So that’s why she knew.
Other people speculate that Americans often think the Twelve Days of Christmas are the days running up to Christmas because the holiday has become so commercialized here that we’re exposed to many, many ads before Christmas that use the idea of the Twelve Days of Christmas to encourage us to buy gifts. So because I was surprised to learn this, and it seemed like most of my friends and family didn’t know either, I wanted to give you a heads-up too.
Oh, and apparently, tradition says it’s fine to keep your Christmas decorations up until the last day of Christmas, January 6, also called Twelfth Night, like the Shakespeare play, which was probably commissioned by Queen Elizabeth I to be performed on the Twelfth Night. But it’s bad luck to keep them up longer.
Finally, I have a familect story from Keevee.
"Hi, Mignon. This is Keevee from Connecticut. I discovered your podcast this year and have enjoyed it a lot. I'm very grateful that there's so many episodes to listen to. My familect story is when my son was four, he loved) having instant chicken noodle soup. Also he loves watching the “Nightmare Before Christmas” movie. There is where both collided. He noticed the character Sally preparing a soup for the mad scientist, and an ingredient called frog’s breath. After that, when he wants a chicken noodle soup, he asked for frog’s breath. It stuck and that's how we call it now. Thanks for the podcast. Bye bye."
Thank you, Keevee. We love that movie too, and when we moved a few years ago, we were absolutely delighted to discover that one of our new neighbors seemed to love it too because they went all out with the most elaborate “Nightmare Before Christmas” decorations I’ve ever seen for Halloween. We loved walking by their house.
If you want to share the story of your familect, a family dialect or a word your family and only your family uses, call the voicemail line at 83-321-4-GIRL, and I might play it on the show. Be sure to tell me the story behind your word or phrase and call from a quiet place.
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to my audio engineer Nathan Semes and my editor Adam Cecil. Our ad operations specialist is Morgan Christianson, our marketing and publicity assistant is Davina Tomlin, our digital operations specialist is Holly Hutchings, and our intern is Kamryn Lacy, who collects vinyl records.
And I’m Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl. That's all. Thanks for listening.