ˈwɒs(ə)l / ˈwæs(ə)l / ˈwɒseɪl / ˈwæseɪl

wassail: a salutation spoken when presenting a cup of wine or drinking to another’s health; the wine drunk on such an occasion; the custom of drinking wine in this way on special occasions; a carousal or celebration; a song sung during such a carousal or celebration; to celebrate or to drink to someone’s health

Here we come a-wassailing
Among the leaves so green;
Here we come a-wandering
So fair to be seen.
Love and joy come to you,
And to you your wassail too;
And God bless you and send you a Happy New Year
And God send you a Happy New Year.

Traditional English Christmas carol

The first problem with wassail is how to pronounce it. You can say it to rhyme with “hassle”, or you can round the first vowel to make it sound like the start of “wobble”. And instead of condensing the second syllable to something like “sill”, you can say it like “sail”. All are acceptable versions.

It started life as a salutation in Old Norse, ves heill, meaning “be well”. The equivalent in Old English was wes hál, and in both languages it was something you said on meeting or departing—the equivalent of both hail andfarewell. But it seems to have mutated into a specific drinking toast among the Danish settlements in England, and it is in that form it turns up in Middle English. A cup was raised or presented with the words Wæs hæil, and the toast was return by saying Drinc hæil—“drink in good health”.

From there, wassail underwent a series of transformations. The wine drunk during the toast became known as wassail, too, and it was drunk from a wassail-cup filled from a wassail-bowl. Then wassail drinking became associated with particular festivals—Christmas Eve, New Year’s Eve and Twelfth Night—and wassail came to be the name of the custom of offering wassail-cups on those occasions. From there it was a short leap to calling any sort of celebratory drinking party a wassail. And finally it became associated with drinking songs, and with Christmas carols.

The first part of the word, wes in Old English, is a little piece of linguistic archaeology, reminding us that we used to have more verb forms in English than we do now. There used to be two verbs “to be” in Old English—beon and wesan. Wesan had connotations of current relevance, while beon applied to habitual states, especially if they implied a state of being that would extend into the future. They shared a common past tense (derived from wesan), but existed in separate forms in the present, subjunctive, imperative and participial. The subtle distinction in meaning between the two different verbs seems to have been patchily observed, at best, and, the various duties of “to be” were soon divvied up between the two  verbs. In modern English, wesan has won the battle for the present tense—am, are and is are all little changed from their Old English wesan equivalents (as are the past tense was and were). But beon has kept the infinitive and the participles—to be, being, been.

Going back to Old English again, the verb in wes hál is the imperative singular form of wesan, used to issue a command or instruction to a single person. We don’t use imperative forms of the verb in English any more, but we do have imperative clauses that do the same job, and they use the infinitive form of the verb: “Be well!”

The second word in the phrase that gave us wassail is hál, “healthy”. And we still use hale in that sense, in the phrase “hale and hearty”. And since wes hál was originally a greeting, we also have hail, in the sense of a greeting (“hail and farewell”), which is now more commonly associated with the act of shouting to someone to attract their attention, as with a loudhailer. Another association with greeting provides hail with yet another meaning—a cry of adulation, as in “Hail, Caesar!” The German equivalent is heil, as in the notorious Nazi salute, “Seig Heil!” meaning “Hail victory!”

Hál is also the origin of health, healthy and heal. In the 15th century there was a sudden enthusiasm for adding “w” to the start of words beginning with “h”, and that gave us wholesome, “health-giving”, and whole, with an original sense of being uninjured, and therefore healthy.

Another strand of development for this word takes us back to its Teutonic roots. While heill meant “healthy” (or “lucky”) in Old Norse, heilagr meant “holy”. The same thing happened in Old High German, in which the adjective heil, meaning “healthy”, contrasted with heilag, “holy”. And in Old English we have hál, “healthy” and halig, “holy”. The link seems to have been with the idea that something holy is inviolable or perhaps indestructible—it stays healthy (if it is a person or god) or whole (if it is an object).

The association with holiness and healthiness made these roots a popular source of children’s names—we have Helga, Olga and Ole, and an old German name Heiluid (“healthy and wide”!) which is the origin of the French Héloïse , which in turns gives us Eloise, Louise, Louis and Lois.

Old English halig of course gave us holy and hallow. In addition to being a verb, “to make holy”, hallow also used to be a noun—a hallow was a holy person or saint. All-Hallows meant “all the saints” (a common dedication for a church). All Hallows’ Day was the festival of All Saints, celebrated on the first day of November, and also called Hallowmas. The day before Hallowmas was Hallow-Eve or Hallow-e’en, which is the origin of our (generally very different) celebration of Halloween.

Halidom is a combination of holy with the suffix -dom, which designates either a state of being (boredom, freedom) or a domain of some kind (kingdom, Christendom). So a halidom is in a state of being holy—it’s a holy place or holy relic. A piece of folk etymology later stepped in to produce the variant holidame— in the belief that the word referred to a “holy dame” in the form of the Virgin Mary. Although neither version crops up much in conversation these days, it was common in the 16th century to swear using references to holy objects and personages, and the oath “By my halidom” crops up several times in the plays of Shakespeare.

JULIA: Host, will you go?
HOST: By my halidom, I was fast asleep.

Two Gentlemen of Verona Act IV, Scene 2

And finally there are plants of family Malvaceae that used to be called hocks, but which are now known as mallows. There are many varieties, including the Common Mallow, the Marsh Mallow, and the Hollyhock—the “holy mallow”.

To finish on a Christmas theme, I’d love to tell you that the name of the holly plant has the same derivation—but it doesn’t. It seems instead to have a long and obscure etymology stretching back to a reconstructed Proto-Indo-European root kel-, meaning “to cut or prick”.

So I’ll just wish you a good wassail, if you’re inclined to have one.

At last, the final instalment of my series of posts about words relating to perihelion. In my first post on the subject, I discussed the various technical terms in astronomical use (and some that have simply been invented by Wikipedians). In my second post, I discussed words formed from the prefix peri-, and its opposite, apo-. This time around I’m going to talk about words relating to Greek helios, “sun”.

The element helium takes its name from helios because it was, improbably, discovered in the sun before it was known here on Earth—its presence heralded by an unidentified emission line in the spectrum of solar prominences.

A heliograph is a “sun-writer”—a system of mirrors used to send messages by reflected sunlight. If something resembles a child’s drawing of the sun—a central circle and spreading rays—it is helioid. A heliolator is a sun-worshipper, and heliotherapy is an attempt to treat disease by exposure to sunlight. An animal or plant is heliophilous if it loves sunlight; it may exhibit heliotaxis (moving towards the sun) or heliotropy (turning towards the sun). Something that exhibits heliotropy is a heliotrope—a name once given to plants like sunflowers and marigolds that turn their flowers to follow the sun, but now applied to a family of little purple flowers that were once imagined to turn in this way. (Which is why the colour heliotrope is a shade of purple, and not a cheery sunflower- or marigold-yellow.)

The opposite of heliophilous is heliophobic (“sun-fearing”), heliofugal (“sun-fleeing”) or apheliotropic (“moving away from the sun”); the last of which employs our old friend, previously discussed, the prefix apo-. A leaf is paraheliotropic if it turns itself edge-on to overly bright sunlight, so as to avoid burning; and a lizard is diaheliotropic if it turns its long axis transverse to the sunlight, so as to present a large surface area in order to warm quickly on a chilly morning.

I’ve written in the past about parhelia (“beside-suns”)—the patches of bright rainbow light that can appear on either side of the sun, which are also known as sun-dogs. An anthelion is a patch of back-scattered sunlight directly opposite the sun—it’s responsible for the glory that is sometimes seen surrounding aeroplane shadows, or the shadows of mountaineers. And paranthelia are a kind of sun-dog to the anthelion—patches of vague brightness caused by multiple reflections within hexagonal ice crystals either side of the antisolar point. (Although anthelion is formed from the prefix ant- combined with helion, it’s pronunciation gives it a central soft “th” sound: ænˈθiːlɪən.)

And by slipping in the word anti-solar, “opposite the sun”, I’ve made my segue to Latin—sol is the Latin word for “sun”, and solar pertains to the sun. As you’ll know if you’ve read Andy Weir’s book The Martian (or seen the film), sol is the technical term for a Martian day, which is forty minutes longer than its Earth equivalent. The actors in Ridley Scott’s film seemed to be a little uncertain about how to pronounce it—it’s sɒl, with a short vowel that rhymes with doll, not dole. The word has shaken off its Latin origins, and with them its Latin pronunciation. If something resembles the sun in its brilliance (literal or metaphorical) it is soliform; and a solarium is a place you go to enjoy the sun.

The word solstice comes from Latin solstitium, “sun standstill”—the times twice a year, when the sun stops moving towards higher latitudes and starts drifting back towards the equator. A summer solstice produces the longest day and shortest night in one hemisphere of the Earth, but it is simultaneously a winter solstice for the opposite hemisphere, bringing the longest night and shortest day. So unless the context is geographically specific, it’s better to talk about the June solstice and the December solstice. At best talk of “the” summer solstice creates potential confusion; at worst, it causes offence to folk in the southern hemisphere who are justifiably tired of “north-centric” usages.

Something you can hold between yourself and the sun, to get a little shade, is a parasol. An oriental parasol, made of bamboo and oiled paper, used to be called a kittisol, from the Portuguese and Spanish quitasol, “warding off the sun”. And the idea of warding off the sun is implicit in the English word umbrella, too—from the Italian ombrella, “little shadow”. The French at least have a name that matches function—French umbrellas are parapluies, “against the rain”.

Something that follows the sun is solisequious. That gives us the Latin equivalent of Greek heliotrope—solsequium or solsequy, old names for the marigold. French tournesol, “turn-sun”, gives us the English turnsole, an old word for both the heliotrope plant and a kind of purple dye. And Italian girasole (“turn-sun”, again) is the origin of girasol, an old name for the sunflower.

The North American sunflower Helianthus tuberosus was imported to Italy in the seventeenth century, primarily as a root vegetable. Its tubers were found to taste like artichoke, so the Italians called it girasole articiocco “sunflower artichoke”. English speakers imported the vegetable, but misheard the name. And so the girasole articiocco became the Jerusalem artichoke.

pɛrɪˈhiːlɪən

perihelion: that point in the orbit of a planet, comet or other body at which it is closest to the sun

Well, time flies. Back on January 4, when the Earth was at its closest to the sun, I started off to write about words relating to perihelion, and got side-tracked into writing about astronomical terminology instead. So now I’m just catching up with the original plan.

Perihelion, I reported last time, comes from the Greek prefix peri-, meaning “around” or “close”, and helios, “sun”. And its opposite is aphelion, which comes from the prefix apo-, meaning “off” or “away”.

Medicine, biology and architecture have a lot of peri- and apo- words, and I’m not going to try to list all that specialist vocabulary—I’ll stick to general vocabulary, albeit with an occasional diversion into the obscure.

A perimeter as literally a “measure around”, a periphery is a “carry around”, and a period is a “way around”. The last one was originally used to designate any kind of cycle in time—the four-year recurrence of the Olympic Games, the longer cycles of planetary movements. Later, by associations with cycles ending and beginning again, period acquired a sense of completion—you could talk about a time period that didn’t recur. In rhetoric people called a complete spoken sentence a period, and from there the word trickled down to eventually attach itself to the punctuation mark with which we end a written sentence.

A periscope lets you look around, peristrophe is the business of turning around, and a peripatus is a place where you can walk around—it gives us the verb peripatize, to walk around, and the adjective peripatetic, given to walking. Aristotle used to walk around the peripatus in the Lyceum while he was teaching—so the word Peripatetic is also used to designate his particular school of philosophy. A periapt is something “fastened around”—a personal ornament or charm. A peristyle is a row of columns around the outside of a building, or the space they enclose. Periegesis is the act of “guiding around”, so it’s a fancy word for a guidebook; while periplus is the act of “sailing around”, which gives us the name for a description of a sea voyage. The Periplus of The Erythryaean Sea is a first-century Greek text, describing the trading ports in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, which is a striking indication of how far-faring European navigators were in those days.

Periphrasis is “declaring around”—the rhetorical device of using a lot of words instead of a few. It has a Latin synonym in circumlocution. Someone given to periphrasis is a periphrast. (Calling your opponent in an argument “a bit of a periphrast” is a fine way to spread puzzled consternation.)

In a previous post I’ve already mentioned periscian, which means “around shadow”—it’s a designation for someone who lives within one of the polar circles, who therefore will have at least one day a year of continuous sunlight, during which their shadow will be cast successively in all directions as the sun sweeps around the horizon. Now it’s time to mention the periœci, from the Greek perioikos, “living around”—it’s a handy word for people or places that are on the same parallel of latitude, but on opposite meridians of longitude. (Pronounce it pɛrɪˈiːsaɪ.) It has an opposite, of sorts, in antœci, “living opposite”, which designates people or places on the same meridian of longitude but opposite parallels of latitude.

On, then, to apo-.

An apograph is something “written away”—an exact copy of a document, in the days of hand copying, which could be sent off somewhere else. Whereas an apology was something “spoken away”—an attempt to make something to go away by talking about it. It was originally a verbal defence of a person or idea. Someone who delivers such an apology is an apologist. The word apologist has retained the original sense of “defence”, whereas apology has become associated with contrition—a rich source of potential confusion over meanings. Apopemptic refers to something “sent away”—an apopemptic monologue is the Greek equivalent of a Latin valedictory address.

An apocalypse is literally the act of taking the cover off something (from Greek calyptra, “cover”)—a revelation, in other words. The biblical Book of Revelation is also called The Apocalypse Of John—and because the revelation the book’s author describes is about the end of the world, that’s what apocalypse has now come to mean. Staying on the religious theme a little longer, something that is apocryphal is literally “hidden away” or concealed (from Greek kryptos, “hidden”). When the Bible was first being assembled, Christian writings with unknown or dubious authorship were called Apocrypha. And because such writings could not be trusted or were deemed false, that’s what apocryphal now means. An apostle is someone who is “sent off”—a messenger; in the biblical sense, someone who carried the message of Christianity to other lands. An apostate is someone who “stands off”—who abandons a previously held belief. It used to have a female equivalent, an apostatrice, but that’s not much used nowadays. And to undergo an apotheosis is literally to “god off”—to become a god; something the Roman emperors did with monotonous regularity. Nowadays it can also mean some sort of transition to a heavenly afterlife or state of bliss.

An apothec is place where things are “stored away” (from Greek theke, “box”)—a storehouse or shop. So an apothecary used to be simply a shop-keeper; the word only later took on the sense of a person who sold drugs and potions specifically.

Apoplexy is a “striking off”—an old word for the sudden disability caused by a stroke. Something apotropaic causes a “turning away”—the word is used to designate a charm, spell, prayer or ceremony intended to ward off evil. And something aposematic causes a “warning off”—it’s the word for the bright colouration affected by some venomous creatures (or creatures just pretending to be venomous), and in that sense it’s the opposite of cryptic, which is used for colouration that serves to conceal the animal.

There are an impressive three rhetorical devices named using apo-. First there’s apophasis, which means “speaking away” or denial—it’s the trick of urging a course of action while pretending to deprecate it (“I wouldn’t for a moment suggest that …”). The splendid aposiopesis (“silence away”) is the name for the action of falling silent once the audience knows exactly what you mean, but before you actually have to say it (“And if that happens, only one course of action is open to us …”). And apostrophe (“turning away”) is the act of breaking off a speech in order to address some absent party (“And I would say this to our opponents …”). The punctuation mark, the apostrophe, has the same etymology. It was originally (and still is) used to indicate where a letter has been “turned away”—that is, missed out.

Finally, I can’t resist mentioning apophthegm, which comes from Greek phtheggomai, “to raise one’s voice”. It’s pronounced ˈæpəθɪm, and although it looks like it might be a synonym for some sort of coughing or spitting, it just means “a pithy saying”. If you’re given to pithy sayings, you are an apophthegmatist, and you apophthegmatize. Who wouldn’t aspire to such a thing?

That’s all for now. Maybe I’ll come back to words relating to the sun in another post. I hope before the next perihelion.

I was trying to explain the content of this blog to someone the other day, and I said that it combined two states of mind, the magpie and the grasshopper—the magpie’s hoarding of appealing objects, the grasshopper’s leaping from place to place

And that, in a self-referential kind of way, got me thinking about the words magpie and grasshopper.

The magpie is a common enough European bird, recognizable by its black-and-white plumage, long tail and rather sinister chuckling call. When I was child you never saw them in Dundee, but during a drive to the west one of them always seemed to show up just outside Glasgow. However, in the last decade they seem to have decided to colonize the Tay estuary, and nowadays I can usually hear a pair of them chortling from the rooftops just down the road.

Their acquisitive nature made them a metaphor for hoarders and collectors, and they gave their name to a 1970s children’s TV programme from Thames Television:

In those days, you were either a follower of the BBC’s staid Blue Peter, or ITV’s very slightly psychedelic Magpie. I was a Magpie kid, and nursed an enthusiasm for Susan Stranks, who was in every way superior to Blue Peter’s Val Singleton, at least in my estimation.

The magpie was original just called a pie. The word was adopted from Old French pie, which in turn came from the Latin name for the bird, pica (preserved in the Eurasian magpie’s scientific name, Pica pica). If something was particoloured, like the bird, it was pied—a word that’s now preserved pretty much single-handedly by the story known in English as “The Pied Piper of Hamelin”. The mysterious piper in the mediaeval story wore a particoloured suit of clothes—in Robert Browning’s version:

His queer long coat from heel to head
Was half of yellow and half of red

The Pied Piper of Hamelin (1842)

The variation piebald has survived better, in application to particoloured horses (the “bald” bit coming from a very old usage, designating a horse with a white blaze on its forehead).

Some time around the turn of the sixteenth century, there seems to have been a vogue for applying given names to common bird species: so we had a Jenny wren, a Robin redbreast, a Jack daw, a Tom tit … and a Margaret pie. Shakespeare disconcertingly turned this into maggot-pie in Macbeth, but the version that persisted was Mag pie. Eventually (like Jack daw), the old name of the bird was forgotten, and it became just plain magpie.

Its Latin name, pica, is a medical term, designating a desire to eat something that isn’t normally considered food (a reference to the magpie’s supposedly indiscriminate appetite). Under the umbrella of pica fall such practices as coprophagy (eating faeces), geophagy (eating earth), ryphophagy (eating “filth”, which I suppose could involve either or both of the preceding), onychophagy (nail biting) and trichophagy (eating hair). This last practice can give rise to a fibrous mass of undigested hair sitting in the stomach, called a trichobezoar or just bezoar.

Bezoar comes from Persian pad-zahr, “against poison”—the original Persian bezoars were concretions taken from the guts of various ruminants, which were held to prevent poisoning if they were dropped into a cup before drinking from it. The Oxford English Dictionary tells me that the most prized bezoar was the lapis bezoar orientale, taken from Persian wild goats; inferior products were the lapis bezoar occidentale, from the Peruvian llama, and the German bezoar, from the chamois. And who knows? Maybe the large surface area of those porous concretions really did absorb a bit of poison.

Grasshoppers, crickets and locusts tend to look alike and behave alike, and together they make up the insect order Orthoptera, “straight wings”. So if you’re not sure whether you have a grasshopper, a cricket or a locust in your hand, you can just nod wisely and call it an orthopter or an orthopteran. Something that resembles an orthopter is orthopterous or orthopteroid.

Grasshopper does what it says on the tin, etymologically speaking, and there’s not much more to add, beyond saying that grasshopperish and grasshoppery are both words meaning “like a grasshopper”, while grasshoppering is living improvidently, like the grasshopper in Aesop’s fable of The Ant and the Grasshopper.

Cricket is imitative in origin—something that goes krik! in the grass. Something like a cricket, or like the noise a cricket makes, is crickety. As far as we know, the insects have nothing to do with the game of cricket, which instead might possibly derived from a kind of footstool called a cricket, and a ball game called “stool-ball”, which (you’ve guessed it) involved throwing a ball at a stool. Then again, it might not.

Locust is from the Latin locusta, which was a word applied to locusts and grasshoppers, but also to lobsters and other crustaceans. Something pertaining to a locust is either locustal, locustian or locustical, so you’re spoiled for choice there.

From locusta and its Latin application to lobsters, the Spanish got langosta (a lobster or crayfish) and its diminutive langostino, by which they designate the small lobster Nephrops norvegicus, otherwise known in English as the Norwegian lobster or the Dublin Bay prawn. The French went down essentially the same etymological route, using langouste for the crayfish and langoustine for the Norwegian lobster. Langoustine is a name that seems to turn up fairly regularly on menus in the UK these days, except when they’re fried in batter and served with tartare sauce, in which case they’re scampi—the plural of scampo, the Italian word for the Norwegian lobster.

The English word lobster also derives from Latin locusta, which was mangled in Old English to loppestre (presumably by someone quite hard of hearing). Lobstering is fishing for lobsters; lobsterish means “red faced”, like a cooked lobster; and to lobsterize is to walk backwards, in the way lobsters are said to do, by people who have never seen a lobster walking.

And I guess all of the above is as good an example as any, of how this blog tends to be both magpie- and grasshopper-minded.