“New Year’s Eve” – by Thomas Hardy

New Years Eve

“I have finished another year,’ said God,
‘In grey, green, white, and brown;
I have strewn the leaf upon the sod,
Sealed up the worm within the clod,
And let the last sun down.’

‘And what’s the good of it?’ I said,
‘What reasons made you call
From formless void this earth we tread,
When nine-and-ninety can be read
Why nought should be at all?

‘Yea, Sire: why shaped you us, “who in
This tabernacle groan”—
If ever a joy be found herein,
Such joy no man had wished to win
If he had ever known!’

Then he: ‘My labours—logicless—
You may explain; not I:
Sense-sealed I have wrought, without a guess
That I evolved a Consciousness
To ask for reasons why.

‘Strange that ephemeral creatures who
By my own ordering are,
Should see the shortness of my view,
Use ethic tests I never knew,
Or made provisions for!’

He sank to raptness as of yore,
And opening New Year’s Day
Wove it by rote as theretofore,
And went on working evermore
In his unweeting way.

— Thomas Hardy (1906)

The Name Game, Part 2: Name change

Would you like to be called Them? If you’re British, you can be, as long as you give yourself a last name too. Care to introduce yourself as Bond — James Bond? Go right ahead. Want to be named after the year of your birth (“Hi, my name is Nineteen Fifty-Two”)? Yes, that’s allowed too. Would you like to travel abroad with a passport bearing your new name, Mickey Mouse? Yup: the Brits are cool with that. As would be most American states. Here in the land of the free, you can go legally by almost any name you wish — as long as it’s not a racial slur, a threat or an obscenity, and as long as it’s not intentionally confusing, it doesn’t incite violence, and it’s not intended to mislead (ie. a celebrity’s name). (However, in the UK you can become known as David Beckham or Pippa Middleton, as long as you’re not deliberately trying to pass yourself off as them — assuming you have the respective abs and butt to even try …) But sadly you won’t get away with calling yourself Princess Diana, Lord Byron, or Captain Von Trapp. Nice try, but it won’t fly.

In recent years, the UK Deed Poll Service has officially bestowed the following new names on British citizens — by sober and deliberate request: Jellyfish McSaveloy, Toasted T Cake, Nineteen Sixty-Eight, Hong Kong Phooey, Daddy Fantastic, One-One-Eight Taxi, Ting A Ling, Huggy Bear, Donald Duck, Jojo Magicspacemonkey and James Bond. According to this service, the country’s largest and most trusted issuer of new names, there are only a few restrictions you have to bear in mind when choosing your new moniker. You are forbidden from choosing a new name that (in the words of the DPS):

  • does not include at least one forename and one surname;
  • is impossible to pronounce;
  • includes numbers or symbols; however, we can print modified Latin characters that include the following accents and marks: acute, grave, circumflex, tilde, diaeresis (umlaut), cedilla, macron, ogonek, caron and a dot;
  • includes punctuation marks – although you can have a hyphen to link forenames or surnames (eg. if you want a double-barrelled name) and an apostrophe in the case of surnames like O’Brien;
  • is vulgar, offensive or blasphemous;
  • promotes criminal activities;
  • promotes racial or religious hatred;
  • promotes the use of controlled drugs or includes the generic or slang name for them;
  • ridicules people, groups, government departments, companies or organisations;
  • may result in others believing you have a conferred or inherited honour, title, rank or academic award, for example, a change of first name to Sir, Lord, Laird, Lady, Prince, Princess, Viscount, Baron, Baroness, General, Captain, Professor or Doctor etc.
  • exceeds the maximum number of characters allowed in a name. There is a limit of 250 characters, including spaces, for forenames (i.e. first name and middle names) and 30 characters, including spaces, for a surname.
  • Please note, if you choose a forename or surname that consists of a single letter or includes modified Latin characters, you may find the computer systems of some record holders will be unable to show your name correctly.  Many computer systems are programmed to only accept standard Latin characters and require at least two characters for the forename and surname.

If you think you might be looking to assume a new identity — at least in name — then don’t go and live in Belgium or Switzerland. In both those countries, your name is pretty much yours for life, unless you can prove that it’s giving you a lot of grief. In Belgium, this involves applying to the Ministry of Justice for a name change — and if it’s your last name you’d like to shed, you’ll need a royal decree. You might succeed if you sport a ridiculous last name that causes you untold embarrassment or emotional distress; people bearing the surnames Salami, Naaktgeboren (“born naked”), and Clooten (“sods of earth” in Middle Dutch, “testicles” in modern Dutch) have managed to secure the much-desired decree from on high. In Switzerland, if you’re having to blush and explain your way through passport control with the name of a notorious criminal stamped all over you, that’s probably enough of a reason for you to ask your Cantonal government to trade it in for a more innocent model.

Marion Morrison, Allen Konigsberg, David Hayward-Jones, Curtis Jackson, Issur Demsky, Robert Zimmerman, Farouk Bulsara, Roberta Anderson, Margaret Hyra, Jonathan Leibowitz, Anna Bullock, and Steveland Judkins were all born mere mortals and went on to find fame and fortune — and spanking new names to go along with (or aid in) their celebrity. Some of them might surprise you.

In 1971 Reginald Kenneth Dwight paid 50p to become Elton Hercules John.

Kate Winslet’s brand-new husband (and Richard Branson’s nephew) used to be Ned Abel Smith. But she didn’t marry a Smith; she married a rock-star, called Ned Rocknroll. Yeah, really.

Olympics fanatic Thomas Manly changed his middle name to the names of 12 Olympic gold medallists.
Sunday Times journalist Matthew Rudd changed his name to Bradley Pitt.
In 2009, Eileen De Bont from St. Asaph, Denbighshire changed her name to Pudsey Bear. Despite getting all her documents and records changed to Pudsey Bear, the passport office refused to issue Pudsey with a passport.
In 2004, a Missouri man changed his name to They.
The Minnesota Supreme Court ruled in 1979 that a name change to 1069 could be denied, but that Ten Sixty-Nine was acceptable.

The Name Game, Part I: What’s in a (brand) name?

 

From amazon to Ziploc, Google to Yahoo!, there’s a host of memorable and marketable brand names that both color our daily language and lord over our common nouns like rock-stars with snappy stage-names. Designed specifically to be ‘sticky’, alluring, unique, easily pronounced and remembered, and especially suited to the product or brand they represent, the names themselves tend ironically to be fairly homogenous in their etymologies, usually falling into one of five basic brand-naming-formula categories: 1) the name (usually surname) of the brand founder(s), 2) an acronym, 3) a portmanteau, 4) one or more meaningful existing proper names (or even common nouns) symbolic of the product in question, and 5) a nickname or invented word symbolic  of or peculiar to the brand or those that created it. (To read more about portmanteaux, see an earlier Glossophilia post: https://glossophilia.org/?p=1355; and here is Glossophilia’s exploration of acronyms: https://glossophilia.org/?p=1342.)

Setting aside those brand names — such as McDonald’s, Levi’s, and FAO Schwarz — whose namesakes are simply founders’ names and therefore which need no further explanation, let’s look at some famous examples of brands with crafty or creative monikers whose origins aren’t so obvious. Once the  codes are cracked, it’s easy to see in which of the categories above the brand names evolved — and succeeded. Thanks to Wikipedia for many of these entries — some verbatim and some parsed.

Aflac (insurance company):

Acronym: the initial letters of the company’s original (and long-winded) name: American Family Life Assurance Company of Columbus

Aldi (grocery store):

Portmanteau: Albrecht (name of the founders) and discount

amazon.com (online general retailer):

Named after the South American river, which is the world’s second-longest and the largest in terms of waterflow

Amoco (oil company):

Portmanteau: American Oil Company

Amstrad (audio equipment):

Portmanteau: its founder’s name: Alan Michael Sugar Trading

AOL (online service provider):

Quasi-acronym: America OnLine

Apple (computers):

Named after the fruit: because it was the favorite fruit of co-founder Steve Jobs, and/or because he had worked at an apple orchard

Coca-Cola (carbonated drink):

Named in 1885 for its two supposedly medicinal ingredients: extract of coca leaves (from which was derived the cocaine in the original recipe) and caffeine, from the kola nut. (The “k” of kola was replaced by a “c” to make the name more memorable and marketable).  See also Pepsi-Cola below.

Duane Reade (pharmacy – and more recently grocery – retail chain):

Named after Duane and Reade Streets in lower Manhattan, where the chain’s first warehouse was located

eBay (online auction house):

Invented word. Ebay started life as AuctionWeb. Its founder, Pierre Omidyar, had already formed a web consulting firm called Echo Bay Technology Group. “It just sounded cool”, according to Omidyar. However, a gold-mining company called Echo Bay Mines Ltd had already taken the URL EchoBay.com, so Omidyar registered his second choice for a name, eBay.com: thus AuctionWeb became eBay.

Esso (oil company):

Quasi-acronym: The pronunciation of the initials of Standard Oil of New Jersey (SO = Esso)

FedEx (express courier):

Portmanteau: Federal Express Corporation, the company’s original name

Fiat (automobiles):

Acronym: Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino (Italian Automobile Factory of Turin)

Finnair (airline):

Portmanteau: Finland and air

Google (search engine):

Invented word: An accidental misspelling of the word googol (the name of the number that has a one followed by 100 zeros); chosen to signify the vast quantity of results/information to be provided by the search engine

IKEA (home and furniture retailer):

Acronym: the first letters of the Swedish founder Ingvar Kamprad’s name plus the first letters of the names of the property and village in which he grew up: Elmtaryd and Agunnaryd

Kinko’s (print and reproduction service):

From a nickname. At college, the company’s founder, Paul Orfalea, was called Kinko because of his curly red hair

Kleenex (facial tissues):

An invented word. In the early 1920s, Kimberly-Clark, a paper manufacturer, developed its first consumer product, Kotex, a feminine hygiene product made of creped wadding; unfortunately it didn’t fare well in the marketplace when first introduced. Seeking to find other ways to use its large supply of creped wadding, the company’s scientists developed a softer crepe and from this the idea of Kleenex facial tissue was born. The Kleenex tissue was envisioned as a disposable cleansing tissue to clean away cosmetics, and was marketed by the same team that developed the Kotex pad.  The name Kleenex was probably a combination of the word “cleansing” (or “clean”) with the capital “K” and the “ex” taken from Kotex.

Kodak (camera and photographic goods):

An invented word. Coined by founder George Eastman, who favored the letter ‘k’ (thinking it strong and incisive), he tried out various new words starting and ending with ‘k’. He saw three advantages in Kodak: It had the merits of a trademark word, it would not be mis-pronounced, and it did not resemble anything in the art. A common misconception that the name is onomatopoeic, sounding like the shutter of a camera.

Lego (toy bricks and construction tools):

Portmanteau (from Danish words): Ole Kirk Christiansen, a Danish carpenter, began making wooden toys in 1932. Two years later, his burgeoning company was named “Lego”, from the Danish phrase leg godt, meaning “play well”

Mattel (toy company):

Portmanteau: founders’ names Harold “Matt” Matson and Elliot Handler

Mitsubishi (automobiles):

Portmanteau: Japanese words mitsu, meaning three, and hishi (with the ‘h’ changed to a ‘b’) meaning diamond (as in the shape, not the gem). Hence the three-diamond logo.

Nabisco (biscuits/cookies):

Portmanteau: its original name, the National Biscuit Company

Nike (sports shoes and apparel):

Named after the Greek goddess of victory

Pepsi (carbonated drink):

(Originally Pepsi Cola): Named after two of its ingredients: the digestive enzyme pepsin and kola nuts.

PG Tips (tea):

Invented name.  Originally Pre-Gest-Tee, the tea’s name implied that it could be drunk prior to eating food, as a digestive aid. Grocers and salesmen abbreviated it to PG. Once labeling tea as a digestive aid was outlawed in the ’40s, the PG name was officially adopted. The company later added “Tips”, referring to the fact that only the tips (the top two leaves and bud) of the tea plant are used in the blend

Pixar (animation studio):

Portmanteau: pixel and the co-founder’s name, Alvy Ray Smith

Qantas (airline):

Acronym: its original name, Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services

Reebok (sports shoes and apparel):

Named after an African antelope (an alternative spelling is “rehbok”)

Samsonite (luggage):

Named after the Biblical character Samson, who was renowned for his strength

Skype (online communication provider):

Quasi-portmanteau: the original idea for the name was Sky–Peer-to-Peer, which became Skyper, then Skype

Sony (record label and audio equipment):

From the Latin word ‘sonus’ meaning sound

Starbucks (coffee retailer/house chain):

Named after Starbuck, a character in Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick; also derived from Starbo, which was a mining camp north of Seattle when the coffee shop/chain was founded in that city

Tesco (retailer):

Acronym/portmanteau: founder Jack Cohen, a London market green-grocer, received a large shipment of tea from T. E. Stockwell. He named his new company using the first three letters of the supplier’s name and the first two letters of his surname

Verizon (phone provider):

Portmanteau: veritas (Latin for truth) and horizon

Virgin (record retailer/label, airline, travel company):

Named after the existing word. Founder Richard Branson, while still at school, started a magazine out of which grew an off-shoot business selling records by mail order; according to Branson, “one of the girls suggested: ‘What about Virgin? We’re complete virgins at business.'”

Twitter (social media channel):

Named after an existing word: twitter. Co-founder Jack Dorsey explained: “We were trying to name it, and mobile was a big aspect of the product early on … We liked the SMS aspect, and how you could update from anywhere and receive from anywhere. We wanted to capture that in the name — we wanted to capture that feeling: the physical sensation that you’re buzzing your friend’s pocket. It’s like buzzing all over the world. So we did a bunch of name-storming, and we came up with the word “twitch,” because the phone kind of vibrates when it moves. But “twitch” is not a good product name because it doesn’t bring up the right imagery. So we looked in the dictionary for words around it, and we came across the word “twitter,” and it was just perfect. The definition was “a short burst of inconsequential information,” and “chirps from birds.” And that’s exactly what the product was.”

Yahoo! (service provider):

Named after a made-up word, yahoo, invented by Jonathan Swift, which he used in his book Gulliver’s Travels; it describes someone who is repulsive in appearance and barely human, which Yahoo!’s founders, David Filo and Jerry Yang, jokingly considered themselves to be.

Ziploc (storage bags):

Presumably a form of portmanteau or compound word combining the first part of the word zipper and lock without the “k” (with the zippered bag locking in flavor and freshness)

 

 

 

Boxing Day

What exactly do Brits get up to on Boxing Day — the day after Christmas? Apart from sheer regret, what is the sentiment of this day post repast?

It isn’t one of pugilistic sport amongst warring family members with hangovers, as some would like to believe. Neither is it the first business day after Christmas when everyone boxes up their unwanted gifts and returns them to stores for exchanges or refunds. No, far from being a symbol of animosity or commercial pragmatism, Boxing Day, dating back to England in the Middle Ages, is historically a day of charity and giving to those less fortunate than ourselves. But although historians agree on its charitable nature, even with its array of legends and traditions, the etymology of the day’s curious name is unclear.

Some argue that Boxing Day is so named because as servants prepared to leave to visit their families on the morning after Christmas — commonly a day off for those in service — their employers would present them with “Christmas boxes” containing gifts. In a variation on that idea, servants were thought to take wooden boxes to work on the day after Christmas for the folks ‘upstairs’ to fill with money or food in return for the faithful service they had received throughout the year. Another theory is that alms boxes placed in churches for parishioners to deposit coins for the poor were opened and the contents distributed on December 26. In the late 18th century, lords and ladies of the manor would “box up” the food left over from their Christmas feasts — or gifts — and distribute them the day after Christmas to tenants who lived and worked on their land. During the Age of Exploration, when great sailing ships were setting off to discover new lands, a Christmas Box was carried for good luck on the treacherous sea voyages. Priests would place small containers on ships before their departure, and crewmen wishing for a safe return would drop money into the box, which was then sealed and kept on board for the voyage. If the ship returned safely, the box was handed back to the priest, still sealed, and kept until Christmas when it would be opened and its contents shared with the poor. Any one of these noble traditions might have given rise to the moniker of the giving day.

Over the years and centuries, Boxing Day gift-giving expanded to include any and all who had rendered a service during the year. The tradition survives today as employers present gifts or bonuses to their workers, and people give presents to tradesmen, postmen, doormen, dustmen, milkmen, porters, and others on whose services our daily lives often depend. In the US, the tradition of tipping at Christmas is generous and widespread.

Boxing Day is marked and celebrated as a bank holiday in the UK, New Zealand, Canada and Australia and other Commonwealth countries. In South Africa, Boxing Day was renamed the Day of Goodwill in 1994. In Ireland it is called St. Stephen’s Day (Lá Fhéile Stiofáin) or the Day of the Wren (Lá an Dreoilín). In several European countries, including the Netherlands, Austria, Germany, Norway, Sweden and Poland, December 26 is celebrated as the Second Christmas Day, and is generally simply a continuation of the previous day’s festivities.

Boxing Day is also known as the Feast of St. Stephen. (The day that Good King Wenceslas Looked Out and ventured out into the cold winter’s night to give alms to a poor man…) St. Stephen was one of the seven original deacons of the Christian church and was specially ordained by the Apostles to care for the poor and displaced, especially the widows amongst those needy souls. St. Stephen was also the patron saint of horses, so Boxing Day is traditionally marked by sporting events, especially horse races and hunts.

 

Silent Night

Silent night! Holy night!
All is calm, all is bright,
Round yon Virgin Mother and Child!
Holy Infant, so tender and mild,
Sleep in heavenly peace!
Sleep in heavenly peace!

Silent night! Holy night!
Shepherds quake at the sight!
Glories stream from Heaven afar,
Heavenly Hosts sing Alleluia!
Christ, the Saviour, is born!
Christ, the Saviour, is born!

Silent night! Holy night!
Son of God, loves pure light
Radiant beams from Thy Holy Face
With the dawn of redeeming grace,
Jesus, Lord, at Thy Birth!
Jesus, Lord, at Thy Birth!

 

Probably the most popular Christmas carol in the world, having been translated into more languages than any other, Silent Night (originally Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht) was written by the Austrian priest Joseph Mohr and organist Franz Xaver Gruber.

The song was first performed on Christmas Eve in 1818 at St Nicholas parish church in Oberndorf bei Salzburg. Father Mohr had come to Oberndorf the year before, having already written the words to Stille Nacht in 1816. Shortly before Christmas, Mohr brought the words to Gruber, the schoolmaster and organist in the nearby village of Arnsdorf, and asked him to compose a melody and guitar accompaniment for the song to be sung during the Christmas Eve service. Why it was written for guitar rather than organ accompaniment isn’t clear; according to Austria’s Silent Night Society, one theory is that the organ in St Nicholas was no longer working. Silent Night historian Renate Ebeling-Winkler Berenguer notes that the first mention of a broken organ was in a book published in the US in 1965, The Story of Silent Night by John Travers Moore.

We can thank John Freeman Young, the second bishop of Florida, for the English translation of this beloved carol. In 1855, Rev. Young become an assistant minister at Trinity Church in New York City, where he served until his consecration as Bishop of Florida in 1867. While at Trinity Church, he collected great Christian hymns from various European churches and translated them into English. In 1859, he published a 16-page pamphlet called Carols for Christmas Tide, and the first of the seven carols in the collection — titled Silent Night, Holy Night — was what would become the definitive English translation of Mohr and Gruber’s Christmas song. While the graves of Mohr and Gruber are the site of annual Christmas services, the grave of Bishop Young is virtually unvisited. Christmas historian Bill Egan wrote (in 2003) that “while Christmas pilgrims flock to the well-kept graves of Joseph Mohr and Franz Xaver Gruber, the Austrian originators of the world’s best-loved carol, Bishop Young’s final resting place has been neglected and ignored by people in Jacksonville and the Episcopal Church.”* However, Egan added that for the past two years, greens were placed on Young’s monument in Jacksonville during the Christmas season by a representative of the Silent Night Society.

Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht has been translated into about 140 languages (according to Classic FM). The web site SilentNight.web.za, dedicated to the carol in all its translations (which it claims numbers in the 300s) publishes the Klingon translation by Dr. Morris Cecil Glalet, Th.D.:

wa’

ram tam   ram Dun
Hoch jot   Hoch wov
Sos’a’Daq je puq’a’Daq
roj ghaj ghu Dun ‘ej tam
yIQong ‘ej roj jot yIghaj
yIQong ‘ej roj jot yIghaj

cha’

ram ram   ram Dun
bejvIp wIjwI’pu’
chalvo’ ghoS yoqpu’ Dun
leluya jatlh chal yoqpu’
bogh le’wI’ toDwI’
bogh le’wI’ toDwI’

wej

ram tam   ram Dun
ghoDev Hov wov
loDpu’ val tIlegh
ta’ma’vaD nobmey nob chaH
naDev toDwI’ le’wI’
naDev toDwI’ jIySus

loS

ram tam   ram Dun
yIwov Hov Dun
voDleHvaD aleluya
wIjatlh chal yoqpu’ je maH
naDev toDwI’ le’wI’
naDev toDwI’ jIySuS

http://silentnight.web.za/translate/

In March 2011, Silent Night was declared an intangible cultural heritage by UNESCO.

 

* Bill Egan, A Grave in Need at St Augustine.com, A Christmas Tale of Three Cities, his contributions to the Christmas International Group at Yahoo.com, of which he is the moderator, and numerous private correspondences.

 


 

Homely: plain ugly, or just plain?

In a recent review — written by an English critic — of a production of La boheme, the soprano in the leading role was described as “well suited to the role of Mimi in her homely, demure appearance.”  Is the use of the word homely here a compliment or an insult — or neither? Well, it depends on who’s reading it…  To British-English readers, and especially to those familiar with the character in question, the meaning is fairly clear: she was presumably simply dressed and not striking in looks, as befits the character of Puccini’s ailing and unassuming seamstress.  But North American readers might have been surprised by the reviewer’s assertion that a “homely” appearance was well-suited to the doomed heroine, since we don’t generally think of Mimi as being ugly.

The OED explains the word’s different meanings on either side of the Atlantic:  1. Brit. a. simple, plain.  b. unpretentious.  c  primitive.   2. N. Amer. (of people or their features) not attractive in appearance, ugly.  3. comfortable in the manner of a home, cosy.  4. skilled at housekeeping.

Curiously, the word plain — one of homely‘s synonyms — is understood by both Brits and Yanks when describing the fairer sex (and the adjective is rarely if ever used to qualify the looks of a man or boy) as not just ordinary or undistinguished in countenance, but as positively unattractive. “She’s no oil painting” could be said of all the plain women of the New World and the old.

When William Wordsworth wrote his poem To the Daisy, the English poet was surely finding a certain beauty in “that homely face” that populates the lawns of English gardens, rather than dismissing the white-petaled weed as unbecoming.

With little here to do or see
Of things that in the great world be,
Sweet Daisy!  oft I talk to thee,
For thou art worthy,
Thou unassuming Common-place
Of Nature, with that homely face,
And yet with something of a grace
Which love makes for thee…

When Benjamin Franklin mused “Let thy maidservant be faithful, strong, and homely“, he was presumably playing on the word’s different meanings — namely, skilled in housekeeping, and safely unattractive.

 

Wassail!

Ever wish you could reach for a more colorful word or expression that captures the spirit of the season but doesn’t make any religious assumptions or references and isn’t the now ubiquitous generic, bland, very PC, multiple-choice “Happy Holidays” that has become our safety greeting of choice?

Lo, we have Wassail! It’s archaic, but this rambunctious, hearty word — almost onomatopoeic in its lift and frothiness (and curiously pronounced “WOSS-el”, rather than the expected “wah-SAIL”) — carries all the bells and whistles of festive winter cheer, both figuratively and etymologically.

Wassail derives from an old English word for a toast or greeting meaning “be of good health” (“wes hal” – old English for “whole”, now embodied in the hale of “hale and hearty”, meaning strong and healthy).  In its more modern form it is a noun with two or three meanings: a festive occasion, or more specifically a drinking bout, and the drink — a spiced or mulled wine or ale — to be consumed on such an occasion (and originally sipped from a goblet in the wassail toast). Wassail is also an intransitive verb meaning to make merry, and to celebrate with drinking.

It’s a shame that this word — so evocative of the way so many of us celebrate the season around the world, regardless of our culture or creed — has slipped into relative obscurity and non-use, presumably falling out of fashion as its promotion of lowly, earthly, hedonistic behavior flew in the face of rising Christian values.

The English tradition of wassailing, which continues to this day and is a celebration of the New Year rather than a mark of any religious occasion, dates back probably to the 12th century, with its actual rituals and practices varying from region to region. Down in the west country of England (Hardy’s Wessex), one such example is pouring the remains of the cider kegs around trees in an orchard, dancing and singing the Wassailing song to ensure a good crop of apples for the following year. In the Midlands, wassailers go door-to-door wishing health and prosperity to householders with a wassail song, expecting in exchange a wee dram to be poured into the wassail bowl proffered. The Wassail Song, unlike other Christmas carols and true to its wassail tradition, doesn’t celebrate the nativity. Both the composer and writer of the lyrics are unknown.

Wassail Song

Here we come a-wassailing
Among the leaves so green,
Here we come a-wand’ring
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.

We are not daily beggers
That beg from door to door,
But we are neighbors’ children
Whom you have seen before
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.

Good master and good mistress,
As you sit beside the fire,
Pray think of us poor children
Who wander in the mire.
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

We have a little purse
Made of ratching leather skin;
We want some of your small change
To line it well within.
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.

Bring us out a table
And spread it with a cloth;
Bring us out a cheese,
And of your Christmas loaf.
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.

God bless the master of this house,
Likewise the mistress too;
And all the little children
That round the table go.
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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1Ea-fIPj6k

 

From History.UK.com:

A Traditional Shropshire Wassail Recipe – for hardened Wassailers!

 

10 very small apples
1 large orange stuck with whole cloves
10 teaspoons brown sugar
2 bottles dry sherry or dry Madeira
1/2 teaspoon grated nutmeg
1 teaspoon ground ginger
3 cloves
3 allspice berries
2 or 3 cinnamon sticks
2 cups castor sugar
12 to 20 pints of cider according to the number of guests
1 cup (or as much as you like) brandy

 

Core the apples and fill each with a teaspoon of brown sugar. Place in a baking pan and cover the bottom with 1/8-inch of water.

 

Insert cloves into the orange about 1/2″ apart.
Bake the orange with the apples in a 350° oven.
After about 30 minutes, remove the orange and puncture it in several places with a fork or an ice pick.

 

Combine the sherry or Madeira, cider, nutmeg, ginger, cloves, allspice berries, cinnamon, sugar, apple and orange juice and water in a large, heavy saucepan and heat slowly without letting the mixture come to a boil.
Leave on very low heat.
Strain the wine mixture and add the brandy.

 

Pour into a metal punch bowl, float the apples and orange on top and ladle hot into punch cups.

 

Makes enough for 15-20 people – but we always wish we had made more!


 

Amazing Grace

 

Amazing grace! (how sweet the sound)
That sav’d a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.

’Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
And grace my fears reliev’d;
How precious did that grace appear,
The hour I first believ’d!

Thro’ many dangers, toils and snares,
I have already come;
’Tis grace has brought me safe thus far,
And grace will lead me home.

The Lord has promis’d good to me,
His word my hope secures;
He will my shield and portion be,
As long as life endures.

Yes, when this flesh and heart shall fail,
And mortal life shall cease;
I shall possess, within the veil,
A life of joy and peace.

The earth shall soon dissolve like snow,
The sun forbear to shine;
But God, who call’d me here below,
Will be forever mine.

From Wikipedia:

“Amazing Grace” is a Christian hymn with words written by the English poet and clergyman John Newton (1725–1807), published in 1779. Containing a message that forgiveness and redemption are possible regardless of sins committed and that the soul can be delivered from despair through the mercy of God, “Amazing Grace” is one of the most recognizable songs in the English-speaking world.

Newton wrote the words from personal experience. He grew up without any particular religious conviction, but his life’s path was formed by a variety of twists and coincidences that were often put into motion by his recalcitrant insubordination. He was pressed into the Royal Navy, and after leaving the service became involved in  Atlantic slave trade. In 1748, a violent storm battered his vessel so severely that he called out to God for mercy, a moment that marked his spiritual conversion. However, he continued his slave trading career until 1754 or 1755, when he ended his seafaring altogether and began studying Christian theology. 

Ordained in the Church of England in 1764, Newton became curate of Olney, Buckinghamshire, where he began to write hymns with poet William Cowper. “Amazing Grace” was written to illustrate a sermon on New Year’s Day of 1773. It is unknown if there was any music accompanying the verses; it may have simply been chanted by the congregation. It debuted in print in 1779 in Newton and Cowper’s Olney Hymns, but settled into relative obscurity in England. In the United States however, “Amazing Grace” was used extensively during the Second Great Awakening in the early 19th century. It has been associated with more than 20 melodies, but in 1835 it was joined to a tune named “New Britain” to which it is most frequently sung today.

Author Gilbert Chase writes that “Amazing Grace” is “without a doubt the most famous of all the folk hymns,” and Jonathan Aitken, a Newton biographer, estimates that it is performed about 10 million times annually. It has had particular influence in folk music, and has become an emblematic African American spiritual. Its universal message has been a significant factor in its crossover into secular music. “Amazing Grace” saw a resurgence in popularity in the U.S. during the 1960s and has been recorded thousands of times during and since the 20th century, occasionally appearing on popular music charts.

 

Face to face, one on one

            

One on one ……….                                or     One to one?

PBS Newshour is reporting this evening that “President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner have agreed to negotiate one-on-one in an effort to broker a deal to prevent the country from going over the so-called fiscal cliff at year’s end.”

Don’t worry: this isn’t a post about the fiscal cliff — even though we are all wondering what exactly this econo-geographical phenomenon actually is, and we’ve all probably imagined what it might look like …

 

No, let’s get back to this interesting meeting. Other US news media outlets are also reporting on and speculating about this imminent one-on-one encounter,  focusing more on the issue of the steep drop ahead than on the manner in which the President and the Speaker will go head-to-head, face-to-face, man-to-man…

I expect most British-English speakers who have read this far are trying to rid their minds of more — let’s say — “intimate” images conjured up by the advertised one-on-one meeting.

 

Yes, in Br.Eng. we keep these meetings — these face-to-face, head-to-head, man-to-man, toe-to-toe, nose-to-nose, eye-to-eye tete-a-tetes — strictly one to another, never allowing the use of one of those highly suggestive conjunctions such as “on” that imply or even hint at the possibility of any undesirable physical contact.

A teacher offering her student a one-on-one tutoring session, or a vicar counseling a lost soul in his flock one on one*, would raise more than a few eyebrows (and probably a few temperatures) in that green and pleasant land called England.

We know exactly what our American counterparts mean, but we’re going to keep it strictly business: mind to mind, sword to sword, face to face. Save the ons for wrestlers and dolphins.

 

* the question of whether the expression should be hyphenated or not, as probably determined by whether it’s used as an adjective or an adverb, is for separate discussion

Sealed with an x

Thirty years ago, in September 1982, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh invented the smiley face. That is, the typed smiley face. Scott Fahlman was frustrated by the fact that on the university’s electronic bulletin board — an early version of the online newsgroup — irony was being lost on a number of the geeky scientists participating in these online discussions: they often just didn’t get the joke. Fahlman suggested using a colon, a hyphen and a closed parenthesis — roughly approximating a smile on its side — as a ‘joke-marker’, to denote those entries that shouldn’t necessarily be taken seriously. Little did Fahlman know at the time that his clever and very useful invention would soon spread beyond his newsgroup to the entire college faculty and student body, before ultimately landing on the World Wide Web, where it spawned a whole population and language of what we now call “emoticons”. Fahlman modestly gives credit to Vladimir Nabokov for coming up with the idea before he did; when the Russian novelist was asked by a New York Times writer in 1969, “How do you rank yourself among writers (living) and of the immediate past?”, Nabokov replied with a virtual wink:  “I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile – some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket, which I would now like to trace in reply to your question.”

Is the emoticon a symptom and symbol of our increasing verbal laziness? Are we no longer able to denote happiness or sadness, humor or irony using just our words? Or perhaps this goes beyond verbal competency and effort. In this age of communicating to the masses — with multiple CCs and BCCs on a single e-mail, hundreds of Facebook friends and thousands of Twitter followers around the world, and the risk of a simple mistake or misunderstanding ‘going viral’ — we can’t always depend on ourselves to get it right and on all our readers to even get it. We don’t even know many of the people who are reading our our e-mails, newsletters or posts nowadays, so we’re writing in the dark. Humor and especially irony vary enormously across languages and cultures; even between the Americans and the Brits, there’s a gaping difference in the use, expectation and understanding of irony, especially in everyday communications, so the opportunities for and likelihood of misreadings and misunderstandings are at an all-time high. When the stakes are high, an emoticon might just save the day, preventing lawsuits, tears, or just hurt feelings.

James Marshall has compiled one of the most comprehensive and entertaining lists of emoticons (of the pure keyboard – ie. non-Unicode – kind): with more than 2,000 entries, his Canonical Smiley List is a thing of beauty when you have some time to kill: http://marshall.freeshell.org/smileys.html

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Not exactly an emoticon but falling into the same category of emotional-keyboard-shortcuts is the ubiquitous digital kiss: “x”. This is surprisingly not a 20th-century phenomenon: The use of x to denote a kiss dates back to as early as 1763, as cited by the OED. The symbolic X itself is very old, starting with the Medieval practice of allowing illiterates to sign official documents with an X (according to Wikipedia). Kissing  the X before witnesses was a sign of sincerity — much like kissing the Bible or a Christian cross, and so the letter X came to symbolize a kiss. The first literary citation of three or more x‘s at the bottom of a letter denoting multiple kisses was in 1901, also according to the OED.*

Is the x (and the xoxo of Gossip Girl fame) now spreading beyond friendly/romantic/personal correspondence and into the office environment? Not just into professional communications, but into the murky world of office politics? And is this just a girl thing? A fascinating article in this month’s Atlantic explores this very real and scary development.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/12/the-xo-factor/309174/

Kisses and Hugs in the Office

How a once-intimate sign-off is feminizing the workplace, for better or worse

By and

Cody Haltom

 

The phone call was friendly, the kind any two professional contacts might have. A colleague had put Amanda McCall, a comedy writer in New York, in touch with a producer in Los Angeles. The two women had admired each other’s work from afar. They chatted about whether they might want to collaborate on a project. They made plans to talk again.

The next morning, McCall received an e‑mail from the producer. “Absolutely LOVED talking,” the woman wrote, followed by a seemingly endless string of X’s and O’s. That afternoon, a follow-up to the follow-up arrived, subject line “xo.” The body read simply: “xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo.”

McCall was mystified. Should she e‑mail back? Should she ask her what it meant? Was she weird for thinking this was weird? “I’d never seen so many hugs or kisses in any kind of correspondence, even from my parents or boyfriends,” she says, laughing. “In which case: Was this person actually in love with me? And if I didn’t respond with equal love, was it going to hurt her feelings?”

This e‑mail was extreme, yes—yet it’s an example of a tic that’s come to plague professional correspondence, especially among women. The use of xo to denote hugs and kisses dates back to at least 1763, when The Oxford English Dictionary first defined X as “kiss,” but e‑mail and social media have provided a newly fertile habitat.

“I feel like xo has taken on its own kind of life,” says Karli Kasonik, a Washington-based consultant.

“I do it, most women I know do it,” says Asie Mohtarez, a writer and social-media editor, noting that she prefers a single x to the full xo.

“In my field, you almost have to use it,” says Kristin Esposito, a yoga instructor in New York.

And no, xo is not a habit unique to 20‑somethings reared on Gossip Girl. It has surfaced in the digital correspondence of everyone from Arianna Huffington to Nora Ephron. Wendy Williams, the talk-show host, says she wishes she could stop using it, but admits that she can’t. Anne-Marie Slaughter—foreign-policy wonk, Princeton professor, and she who still can’t have it all—doesn’t xo, but knows several professional women who do. In Diane Sawyer’s newsroom, staffers say, the anchor uses xo so frequently that its omission can spark panic.

As e‑mail has evolved further and further from its postal roots, our sign-offs have become increasingly glib. While Sincerely or With best wishes might have been the ending of choice for a letter or a business memo, these expressions feel oddly formal when pinged back and forth in immediate, high-volume e‑mail exchanges. And so Sincerely begat Best begat Cheers and so on, until, somewhere along the line, xo slipped in.

At first, its virtual identity was clear: a pithy farewell, sweeter than See you later, less personal than Love. Men could xo their wives. Girlfriends could xo girlfriends. It was a digital kiss—meant, of course, for somebody you’d actually kiss. But soon enough, nonstop e‑mails and IMs and tweets began to dilute its intimacy factor. “You could compare [it] to how the epistolary greeting Dear changed over time, originally just for addressing loved ones but eventually becoming neutral,” says Ben Zimmer, a linguist and lexicologist.

Today, xo is so common that researchers at Georgia Tech, Carnegie Mellon, and Stanford have studied its use in social media, and confirmed what most everyone on the Internet already knows: xo is a female phenomenon. Among Twitter users, 11 percent of women xo in tweets, compared with only 2.5 percent of men.

This gender divide has spawned a new breed of etiquette dilemmas, especially in the workplace. Can xo-ing colleagues shore up office alliances, or does the practice cross a line? Does one run the risk of being labeled a bitch for refusing to reciprocate? And what happens if a woman accidentally xo’s her male boss?

He almost certainly wouldn’t xo back, for fear of coming off as unauthoritative, unprofessional, or just plain creepy. Zimmer says he would never dare xo anyone but his wife (though the female editor of his Boston Globe column xx’s him frequently). Most men say xo has become so feminized, they wouldn’t even consider using it. “I’ve never signed an e‑mail, letter, text, stone tablet, smoke signal, or any other form of communication with xo,” says Brett Webster, a television producer in L.A. “Rightfully or wrongfully so, I would assume a guy who includes xo in correspondence is gay. Or a football coach.”

Why, then, has xo become such a fashionable accessory for women? Why, after all the strides we’ve made to be taken seriously at work, must we end our e‑mails with the digital equivalent of a pink Gelly Roll pen?

Certainly, the feminine utilities of xo are multifold. Insert it casually as a symbol of closeness, authentic or not, with a friend or colleague—or, as Slaughter sees it, as a small high-five of professional sisterhood. Use it à la Sawyer, to inspire loyalty (or fear) among staffers. Or simply resort to it as easy filler when you don’t want to put the effort into something longer. “It’s much faster to type the four-stroke xxoo than With warm wishes followed by a comma,” says Lynn Gaertner-Johnston, a writing expert and the founder of a company called Syntax Training. “If someone can type a smiley face in one second, why write a sentence like I appreciate your thoughtfulness?”

There’s also the matter of women’s tonal antennae, which pick up on even the smallest shifts. “In e‑mail, ending a command with a period can feel brusque,” says Anne Trubek, a professor of rhetoric at Oberlin College. So we use xo, along with other effusive indicators—exclamation points, ALL CAPS, repeating letters (Hiiii)—to signal emotional availability. According to Deborah Tannen, a Georgetown linguist who studies gender, these habits tend to parallel the way women speak as compared with men: with intonation patterns that go up and down more, with more emphasis on certain words, and about more-personal topics.

In some settings, xo-ing may be a way to indirectly apologize for being direct—think of all those studies concluding that women must be authoritative in the office, but also nice. One such study, by a psychologist at NYU, determined that the best way for a woman to be perceived as likeable at work is to temper strong demands with “a little bit of sugar.” In that context, xo can be seen as a savvy means of navigating a persistent double standard.

Or maybe, as Trubek suggests, xo‑ing is just like actual hugging: women do it more often than men, some women do it more often than other women, and that’s that.

“As someone who’s regularly ended letters to her accountant with xxx, I refuse to feel any shame for this widespread woman-trait,” says Caitlin Moran, the British feminist and author of How to Be a Woman. “Statistics show we’re slowly taking over the world, and I’m happy for us to do it one xxx e‑mail at a time.”

Jessica Bennett, formerly of Newsweek, is the executive editor of Tumblr. Rachel Simmons is the author of Odd Girl Out and The Curse of the Good Girl.
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* Enwiktionary: OED: “X” 1763 Gilbert White Letter (1901) I. vii. 132, I am with many a xxxxxxx and many a Pater noster and Ave Maria, Gil. White.