Hiding in plain sight
The stories of language that we stopped listening to
I’ve always loved words that wear their hearts on their sleeves. The ones that we glide over without really seeing, because something about them has changed. Take the word ‘breakfast’, or as we like to say, brek fuhst. Break it down and it becomes of course the meal that breaks our fast, the first food after the nightly abstinence of sleep. It’s the simplest of stories, but over the centuries sound has washed it so clean that few children learning the word today would recognise it.
‘Cupboard’ is another, a word that has collapsed into a different shape entirely in the form cubberd. Its two parts will tell us that it was once indeed a ‘board’ – or table - for our ‘cups’. It’s the same sense you’ll find in ‘board and lodging’, in which ‘board’ simply means ‘food at the table’.
In much the same way, our squashed pronunciation might convince an alien that ‘war’ is at the heart of ‘wardrobe’ (in which case, what’s a drobe?), when in reality it’s a place in which to ward, or ‘guard’, our robes. This was once an essential job given the value of lavish gowns and vestments of office - not for nothing does ‘robber’ break down into ‘stealer of robes’.
Christmas became Crissmus long ago, but the Mass of Christ is still there if you look for it. A holiday, similarly, was a ‘holy day’, one set aside for religious observance and often marked red in the calendar, hence a memorable ‘red-letter day’. Once again, when spelling and sound divorced all those centuries ago, the picture became a little blurry.
Speaking of spelling, some words owe their disguise to a letter shift or two. Of these, my favourite might also be the simplest. The daisy flower began as the day’s eye, the flower that opens its petals in the morning to reveal its sunny yellow disc, and closes them again at dusk, like the lashes of an eye. It feels like a tiny poem within a single name. And almost as beautiful to my mind is the word ‘window’, a legacy of the Vikings with the literal meaning of ‘wind’s-eye’, the opening in a wall through which the weather looked in.
Some examples are darker than they seem.
