Christmas words reveal ancient roots of mid-winter festival
Word for Word explores yuletide, mass and grime to find the linguistic roots of the holidays
We web writers at the CBC publish thousands of words every day, and we try to spell them correctly. But then you find yourself writing "fiery" and it doesn't create a squiggly red line to say it's spelled wrong. Shouldn't it be firey?
No. A fire becomes fiery because the English language can be quite stupid. Specifically, English people in the 1200s spelled the word "fire" or "fier," and finally settled on fire. But with true English logic, they picked fiery for the adjective.
And so at Christmas, the fire burned their yule logs with fiery warmth.
Christmas lets us haul out words that we never, ever use. For example: yule. For three weeks each year we sing yuletide carols and burn (or eat) yule logs.
What exactly is a yule? Think of it as a forgotten pagan's last-ditch effort to remind us of the real reason for the season: Woden (or Odin), the Norse god of healing, death, royalty and the gallows.
Like pretty much every northern culture, northern Europeans needed a reason to throw a party around the winter solstice and Woden's 12-Day Yuletide Feast became their celebration.
When Woden's worshippers converted to Christianity, they stopped calling it Yuletide and re-branded it the 12-Day Feast of the Nativity, which changed to Christmas about 900 years ago.
Yule lives on in yuletide and yule logs — and possibly in jolly old Saint Nick. One etymology traces "jolly" back to the same root as yule. We still sneak in a weekly tribute to Woden, too, as Wednesday is really Woden's Day.
The "tide" part of yuletide uses the word in an older sense, meaning a season or division of time. Tidal waters rise and fall at regular times, and eventually tide lost its sense of time.
Have yourself a grimy little Christmas
Christmas itself has a simple etymology, and then a weird one. The simple one is that it's the mass celebrated for Christ.
The weird one takes us back 6,000 years to those Proto-Indo European speakers, who gave us the root word ghrei, meaning to rub. That root blossomed into grime, grisly, cream and Christ. How? Because the Greek word khristos means the anointed one, and you anointed someone by rubbing oil on them.
Mass is connected to message, missile and mission, all of which spring from the idea of "to let go, to send off." It comes from the Latin phrase "Ite, missa est," which means "Go, it is the dismissal."
Those are generally the last words a priest says in a Catholic church, just before people get the message and take off like missiles out the back door. Missa became mass and people named the whole ceremony for the end.
Finally: Santa Claus. This word finds its root in 1994, when actor Tim Allen discovered that by accidentally killing Santa Claus, he had to become Santa Claus.
Wait — I'm being told that's not correct. One moment.
Ah: it's actually simpler than that. A wonderful man named Nicholas lived in the third century in Turkey. He exemplified Christian virtues and everyone knew how he'd always give presents to the poor. He loved children especially.
After his days on Earth ended, he was declared Saint Nicholas and his feast day held on Dec. 6.
Slowly, his saint's day connected to Christmas a few weeks later. Several centuries of saying "Saint Nicholas" quickly turned his name into Santa Claus.
So happy holy days to one and all.
Word for Word is the CBC's monthly etymology column. Got an idea for a topic? Tweet Jon. Sign up for Word for Word to have it delivered into your inbox.