All these days off recently have driven me mad: we take a day off because some character from a late-Bronze-Age science fiction book did a few implausible things with the help of quite a lot of Middle Eastern authors high on heavy herbal stimulants.
Not all of them are holy days: we have
bank holidays, regional holidays, national holidays, school holidays, etc.
But why do we call them holidays, and
where does the idea come from?
I was recently recovering from one of the
numerous four-day weeks that plague the first half of the calendar and are
conspicuous by their absence after the summer break, except for a little respite
at the beginning of November. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for a reduction in
the working week, but their irregularity (sometimes on a Thursday, often on a
Monday, really causes severe issues with my course calendar. This year is
really extreme. I finish most courses in mid-June, except for those on Mondays,
which don’t finish until July.
Anyway, all this made me contemplate the
origins of the word holy. Stand by for a wild ride…
HAIL/HEALTH
One of the only words non-German speakers
know from German is the word Heil. I won’t go into details why, but let’s
say it preceded the name of a mad Austrian with a brushy moustache. Heil means
a few things, namely “salvation” as a noun, and “safe”, “medicinal” or “healing”
as an adjective, giving English the very words “heal”, “health”, and all their
derivatives. This was the direct translation from Latin ave, seen in the
phrase Ave Caesar, the Roman version of Heil You-Know-Whom,
meaning “hail” or “wish well”.
WASSAIL
In Modern English, there are a lot of
hangovers from the “hail” connection, for example in Midwinter, it is common to
go wassailing in more folksy parts of the English-speaking world, and “wassail”
comes from the Old English wæs hæil, meaning “be healthy”. Wæs,
as a word, is now found in the past simple form as “was”, but many centuries ago
it was the main form of the verb and the imperative. So the idea of wassailing was
to wish health to one and all, as well as the nature for the coming year, in
hope of fruitfulness and fecundity.
For comparison, the Dutch imperative of “to
be” is wees and the German Wesen, means “being”, as in human
being.
This is where it gets a bit bizarre…
HALIBUT
Yes, you read that right: the fish. The
name comes from the fact that it was eaten on holy days, in the tradition of
not eating meat. Butt in German is a flatfish like a flounder, add that
to “holy” and that’s what it is: the holy flatfish.
HOLIDAY
So let’s cut to the chase: a “holiday” was
originally a “holy day”, such as Christmas or Easter, because they were the only
days that working people were allowed to take off… or were forced to take off.
During the first Black Death in the 14th century, workers gained
quite a lot more rights, as there were so few healthy people still able to do
anything, and so they lobbied for more “holy days”, even ones that weren’t
connected to religion. Over time, “holiday” came to signify any non-working day,
standing apart from “holy days”, which were days when people went to a big stone
building to send telepathic messages to famous dead people and hear some of
those late-Bronze-Age science fiction readings.
HAPPY HOLIDAYS
When any traditionalist tells you not to
say “happy holidays” because it’s such a modern, non-religious invention, this
is what to do: rather than punch the person on the nose, tell them the phrase
actually dates from the mid-19th century when piousness was still in
fashion, and by the late 1930s was common parlance, even being used by various
companies for marketing purposes, such as Camel and Coca-Cola. So it’s not a
new thing – get over it, snowflakes!
SANCTIMONIOUSNESS
Here is a word that really stands out from
the crowd. In English, as well as French and Latin, it means the ostentatious
showing of your holy credentials. Being sanctimonious was and is to give the
outer appearance of a do-gooder, even to the extent of criticising others for
being less virtuous than you.
There are a few of these on Facebook that
never stop telling us how pious they are, but sometimes it’s about the secular
world too: someone in my wider professional circle was completely indifferent
to our efforts in March to help Ukrainian refugees. When I approached them about
it, they more or less stared straight over me and out the back to the wall. My
hair was smoking for a good ten minutes from the laser-precision stare. But
after a week of seeing how we were getting on, suddenly, there was an almighty
change of heart, and suddenly this person was practically auditioning for
Fundraiser of the Year.
Why did I bring this up? Because the Dutch,
Germans and Scandinavians have a lovely word for people like this: Schijnheilig
/ Scheinheilig / Skinhellig. The root words of “shine” in less diluted
Germanic languages double up to mean both “seem” or “appear”, and at the same
time “shine” or “gleam”. This awesomely passive-aggressive word translates
literally as “shine-holy”, and I love it.
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