Today is Hogmanay, and when my wife asked me about the word I said confidently that I had once done a post on it and would refresh my memory and tell her. Imagine my surprise when I discovered I hadn’t! So I am remedying the omission now; happily, the OED updated their entry in 2010:
1. Scottish and English regional (northern). (The call used to demand) a New Year’s gift; esp. a gift of oatcakes, bread, fruit, etc., traditionally given to or demanded by children on the last day of the year. Now rare.
1443 Et solutum xxxj die decembris magn. hagnonayse xijd. et parv. hagnonayse viijd. xxd. Et solutum primo die mensis Januarij Pasy munstrallo ex precepto domini xijd. Et solutum iiijto die mensis Januarij instrionibus Thome Haryngton ex precepto domini xxd.
in Folklore (1984) vol. 95 253
[…]
1905 The visitors never failed to receive their Hogmanay which consisted usually of bun, shortbread, and wine or whisky.
Scottish Review 21 December2. Originally and chiefly Scottish. The last day of the year, 31 December; New Year’s Eve; spec. the evening of this day, often marked with a celebration.
Recorded earliest in compounds.1681 We renounce..old wives Fables and By words, as Palmsunday, Carlinsunday,..Peacesunday, Halloweven, Hogmynae night, Valenteins even.
W. Ker et al., Blasphemous & Treasonable Paper emitted by Phanatical Under-subscribers 3
[…]
1985 Hogmanay saw Frank and me delirious On five pernod and blackcurrants plus four cans Of special plus a snakebite We didny know how to make right.
L. Lochhead, True Confessions 1032001 It’s Hogmanay, time to party and look bootylicious for the Bells.
Sunday Herald (Glasgow) 20 December (Magazine) 29 (caption)
(I like very much the title A blasphemous & treasonable paper emitted by the phanatical under-subscribers; you can see the “Hogmynae night” section at the bottom right on p. 3, in the paragraph starting “We renounce the Names of Moneths.” As for the 2001 citation, the Bells in question might be this or this or yet another.) The etymology is particularly interesting:
Probably < Middle French auguilanleu, haguirenleu (14th cent.), haguimenlo, aguilanleu, aguiloneu, aguillenneu, etc. (15th cent.), Middle French, French aguillanneuf (15th cent.; now only in regional use) New Year’s Day, New Year’s celebration, New Year’s gift, cry with which people (especially children) greet the New Year and demand a New Year’s gift < a first element of unknown origin + (probably) l’an neuf the new year < le the + an year + neuf new. The Middle French and Older Scots words do not correspond exactly in form, although compare also modern French regional forms such as oguinane, guignannée, etc. (for further forms see Französisches etymologishes Wörterbuch vol. XXIII 160 at étrennes; for probable Middle French variants hoguinenno, hoguilenno, etc. see also Dictionnaire étymologique de l’ancien français at hoguinenlo). Compare (< French) Spanish aguinaldo, †aguilando (15th cent.).
Notes
The example in quot. 1443 at sense 1 is unusual for its form, its early date, and its southerly localization (West Riding, Yorkshire), but it does appear to show an example of this word.
I’ll take this opportunity to quote Jen in Edinburgh’s 2020 comment:
This sort of reminded me about a conversation we had at New Year, about how people in England will go up to each other ON HOGMANAY and say ‘Happy New Year’, even though it’s still the old year – a thing I had just witnessed, having been away in England between Christmas and New Year.
I can’t do that – I have to say something like ‘have a good new year when it comes’ until it has come, and that seemed to be the consensus of our Scottish gathering.
I’m with her: it’s not New Year’s until it’s the new year. So Happy Hogmanay, everyone, and when the time comes for a new year, have a good one!
A popular explanation (e.g. https://etimologias.dechile.net/?aguinaldo ) suggests Spanish “aguinaldo” < "hoc in anno" "in this year".
I found a 1609 Christmas song that uses these words: https://www.cpdl.org/wiki/index.php/Puer_natus_in_Bethleem_in_hoc_anno_(Michael_Praetorius)
"Hoc in anno gratulemur / Genitorem veneremur"
By the way, I’ll be spending most of the day at my sister-in-law’s gorging on roast beef and Yorkshire puddings and guzzling nero d’avolo, so I won’t be around these parts till sometime in the evening. If your comment falls into moderation, you’ll just have to wait, but I’ll get to it eventually.
‘The Bells’ is just midnight on Hogmanay (as marked by the striking of twelve), although these days people might be more likely to take their cue from fireworks. Not sure who’ll manage to set some off tonight, though, it’s pretty wild.
(Here’s a weather forecast for before, at and after the bells! https://www.glasgowlive.co.uk/news/glasgow-news/glasgow-hogmanay-weather-hour-hour-30684006)
While the crusty OED may declare it “now rare”, this morning’s NY Times uses it.
“ By Nazaneen Ghaffar
Reporting from London
Dec. 31, 2024
Updated 8:23 a.m. ET
The famed Hogmanay street party on New Year’s Eve in Edinburgh, the Scottish capital, has been canceled because of forecasts of rain, strong winds and snow.
The cancellation of outdoor events in the city followed warnings from the Met Office, Britain’s national weather service, that adverse winter weather would disrupt the festivities and travel plans.
Indoor events in Edinburgh, and celebrations in other cities in Scotland, are expected to proceed, organizers said.
Hogmanay, a traditional Scottish festival marking the end of the year that has been celebrated for centuries, includes festivities that often extend to Jan. 1 and 2. Cities including Glasgow, Aberdeen and Inverness host their own events, but the one in Edinburgh is the largest and best known, attracting tens of thousands of visitors each year. The street party in Edinburgh typically features a torchlight procession, concerts and fireworks.”
I think the ‘now rare’ just refers to ‘hogmanay’ as the name of a gift – as the name of the day it’s pretty ubiquitous in Scotland (and further afield as the name of an event – people will go to Edinburgh for Hogmanay who would only be celebrating New Year’s Eve if they spent it at home).
Nero d’Avola, surely…
Have a good one!
It becomes Nero Diavolo when guzzled. Wreaks hell on the vowels and the bowels, in my limited experience.
But why should I wait until the new year to wish that people should have a happy one? I can express my desire that the next year be happy at any point.
Band name.
In my part of Germany, you normally wish einen guten Rutsch ins Neue Jahr in the days before and Frohes Neues Jahr after the clock strikes twelve. That is in person, you can convey your best wishes for the New Year in writing even before that.
In any case, Einen guten Rutsch for all Hatters, may the New Year be happy and pleasant!
New Zealand is ten hours into 2025, so Happy New Year to all yous stuck in last year. (Despite a sufficiently strong Scottish tradition here that we need two days of public holiday to recover, I seldom hear “Hogmanay”.)
Nero d’Avola, surely…
Quite right, my bad (hic).
And yes, the “Now rare” only refers to the first sense: “(The call used to demand) a New Year’s gift; esp. a gift of oatcakes, bread, fruit, etc., traditionally given to or demanded by children on the last day of the year.”
Nɛ ya yʋʋmpaalig, Zupibig dima!
З Новим 2025 роком!
“the phanatical under-subscribers” were Walter Ker, John Gibb, David Jamison, and John Young. They had about 26 female followers, and were called Gibbites or Sweet Singers. Some emigrated to New Jersey, where Jamison became Chief Justice, and Hogmanay remains little observed to this day.
An unrelated sect of Gibbite Sweet Singers had numerous followers in New Jersey in the late 1970s.
Russians say “With forthcoming New Year!” or whatever it is when you back translate it into the original language.
Perhaps the same principle as the Kusaal: nɛ ya yʋʋmpaalig is for bareka nɛ ya yʋʋmpaalig “blessing with your New Year.”
(The reply is Naa, by the way, with a long falling tone. All together now!)
French etiquette permits the sending of Vœux for the New Year at any time in January. Earlier is better, but 31 January is better than 31 December.
The most recent OED entry is interesting. A fair amount of work has been done on collocations, i.e. situations where if word A appears word B is comparatively likely to appear nearby. Is there a name for the opposite phenomenon, where the appearance of word A in a text makes it less likely that word B will appear, because their usage is inversely correlated? Because it seems to me that despite that 2001 counterexample, a text including “Hogmanay” should be less likely than average to include “bootylicious,” and vice versa.
In any event, あけましておめでとうございます, y’all, as they don’t quite put it in Gaelic.
なー! (As they put it in Kusaal.)
> An unrelated sect of Gibbite Sweet Singers had numerous followers in New Jersey in the late 1970s.
And surprisingly, to this day in a small village in Veracruz state, where the locals celebrate New Year’s the way they do weddings, till dawn. In part by playing disco hits.
A somewhat groggy feliz año to Hatters from that same village!
Can someone translate the 1443 citation about great and little Hogmanay? I want to know exactly which old wives’ Fables I’m meant to renounce.
And paid on 31st December (for) large hagnonayse (12d.) and small hagnonayse (8d.), 20d.
https://archive.org/details/langlonormandspe0000jour/page/68/mode/1up?q=hagnonayse
Is the original clearly hagn and not hagm in that cite? With the n, it looks more like a clipped “have a good nove anè”. This is not so silly, the Anglo-Norman dictionary has hagedaie for “have a good day” (unless that entry is a joke).
a text including “Hogmanay” should be less likely than average to include “bootylicious,”
As long as the text is recent enough for “bootylicious”, why shouldn’t they occur together? “Hogmanay” is not archaic to those who know it, like Jen, and Scotland is not impervious to originally-US slang. And partying and looking attractive are topics that are likely to occur together.
For whatever reason, the OED uses this same quotation at the bootylicious entry (covered at Language Hat in 2004; maybe that’s why Hat thought he’d posted about Hogmanay).
compare also modern French regional forms such as oguinane, guignannée, etc.
La Guillonnée or La Guiannee survives in two towns in Missouri, also mentioned at Language Hat: 2006, 2009.
French etiquette permits the sending of Vœux for the New Year at any time in January. Earlier is better, but 31 January is better than 31 December.
The German rule is “you can do it the first time in the New Year that you see someone”, but after January 10th or so you’ll have to add some words acknowledging that it’s getting a bit late for the greetings, and after January 20th or so it becomes weird if not played as half a joke.
I only just now noticed the connection of Hogmanay to Hogfather (Pratchett’s third best book).
A friend I was with last night was accidentally wished a happy Hog Monday, courtesy of autocorrect.
As it happens, I was down the ‘Hogmanay’ rabbithole a few days ago, following this story in the Guardian. I had just checked Wiktionary when my wife pushed this Norwegian Scrooge McDuck comic on me, thinking I might be interested in the Norse connection. That took me further down the rabbithole.
I don’t know what to make of it, but let me start by stating that I think the Norman/Romance etymology is weak. The 1443 attestation from Yorkshire provides sort of a geographical and temporal link, but it doesn’t come through as clearly related to the Scottish tradition(s). Nor to the continental traditions, for that matter.
Wikipedia offers two other etymologies, one Gaelic and one Old Norse:
The Gaelic one is even weaker than the Romance, amounting to the attestation of a Manx form of a Hogmanay rhyme and a sound-a-like greeting that seems made up to explain the name.
The Old Norse may be the best on offer, but Old Norse etymologies in Scottish often contain wishful thinking, and this may well be the case here too. On the surface, the derivation of hogman < haugmann is straightforward, even obvious. There’s also no doubt that the nights after Christmas were haunted by elves, ghosts, pre-Christian gods and other occult powers, very much including the dead ancestor in the mound (Haugkall is one of the old conceptions going into the modern nisse as a Christmas spirit), although I haven’t found other cases of the haugmann or haugkall being the central figure in the popular accounts. But if we accept it, I think modern hogmanay might have two origins. One is in Hogmanay Night, where it could continue the Old Norse genitive plural haugmanna-. The other is in the rhyme Hogmannay, trolla lay, where it might be from an invocation Haugmenn há! “Mound-men ho!” Trolla-lay looks like the regular phonological development of Old Norse *tralla-la, a common Scandinavian humming phrase to this day. An origin as a formula for banishing trolls into the sea is an interesting thought, but essentially wishful thinking. The existence in both Manx and Yorkshire English speaks for an Old Norse etymology: A problem with the Old Norse etymology is that forms with -m- aren’t universal, and especially the Shetland forms with -r(V)n- are bothering me.
Oh, and a happy new year to everybody! May it be one of good news!
Belated holiday cheer, for aficionados of dialect humor. How distinct is that Maine accent from elsewhere in New England?
Thanks, I enjoyed it! (My wife says her father used to tell that story, but about two old ladies and a goose.)
@Y: to my ear, that reads as a distinct but fairly light northern new england accent, slightly generationally-outmoded. i’d’ve pegged it as maine or possibly old line new hampshire (mostly because i don’t hear it as vermontish), but it doesn’t scream downeaster to me. part of that may be about the literary flow and rhythm of the piece, where i think of downeast english as (stereotypically) more laconic and staccato. but i’m a flatlander and a greater-bostonian (which one is more disqualifying depends on the northern new england frame of reference), so my sense is a bit questionable at best.
It just dawned on me that Manx is *Mannsk in English phonology.
YouTube is littered with people who render, say, Kursk as [kʰɹ̩k͡s] as if they were talking about the ecclesiastical history of Scotland.
The only [t͡θ] attested outside the Yukon Territory!
…ultimi sunt enim Romanorum.
Awesome, but really sounds like a folk etymology. End-stressed tralala as a nonsense word to fill out space in songs is much more widespread than trolls ever were.
Here they go; and while the English article only offers Wilde Jagd “wild hunt” and Wütendes Heer “enraged army” as German names, the German one mentions that Alemannic dialects have forms like Wüetisheer, a plausible outcome of “Wuotan’s army”. There’s a distinct shortage of burial mounds up South, though, and the ones that do exist aren’t traditionally believed to contain ancestors. That may be why Dec. 31st, a half-holiday like Dec. 24th, is boringly called Silvester after a saint of the day (an early pope).
Father with [æ]. Wonders don’t ever cease, do they.
Thanks, rozele. I should note that Marshall Dodge was a New Yorker who specialized in Maine humor. Not that it necessarily makes it inauthentic: some dialect imitators are among the finest phoneticians out there.
You’re welcome, Hat! For dessert, along the same lines but more spectacular, Brautigan reads his Revenge of the Lawn. The accent is entirely authentic Warshington.
@DM: The only [t͡θ] attested outside the Yukon Territory!
A few others. PHOIBLE (search “inventories” under θ), shows some non-Yukon Athabascan languages, Luo (intervocalically θ), Ghomalaʼ (Grassfields Bantu, allophone of /t/ before /h/), and Burmese (an allophone of θ). Afade (Chadic) has it as an ejective, as does Halkomelem.
@David M.: Yes, I should have added that an Old Norse origin for trolla-lay would be surprising. Norwegian folk songs usually use other phrases for scatting. Trall n. and tralle v. are common words for humming and simple, unassuming singing, but nowhere to be found in Old Norse, so I assume they … no, wait, no need to assume. I see that tralle is from LG, a cognate of Eng. troll in the same meaning.
End-stressed tralala as a nonsense word to fill out space in songs is much more widespread than trolls ever were.
Tweedledum and Tweedledee are named Trulala and Tralala (…modulo palatalization, anyway) in the best-known Russian translation.
That may be why Dec. 31st, a half-holiday like Dec. 24th, is boringly called Silvester after a saint of the day (an early pope).
These days in Israel the Dec 31/Jan 1 holiday is usually known as Novi God (נוֹבִי גוֹד), but it used to be called Silvester (סילבסטר).
I had to wonder what Hogmany was celebrating before the calendrical change of 1600 (in Scotland), when the new year started on March 25 (England and the rest of Great Britain changed in 1752, when the calendar also change to Gregorian, dropping 11 days)
WikiP ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Style_and_New_Style_dates ) notes that:
Where the footnotes include:
Me: Norwegian folk songs usually use other phrases for scatting
Typically variants of su-di-da su-di-dei or su-de-li su-de-la.
Exhibit 1: Eg rodde meg ut på seiegrunnen
Exhibit 2: Gamle Gunnleik
A sull is a soothing song, like in bånsull “lullaby”.
To ktschwarz’s point, I guess maybe the situation is that there are both: a) some/many Anglophones for whom “Hogmanay” and “bootylicious” are in such different registers that they are unlikely to co-occur, but also b) other Anglophones (at least one Glaswegian newspaper writer as of a few decades ago…) for whom the words are in the same register and thus might plausibly be uttered or written in the same context. The a’s may be more numerous than the b’s in the Anglospheric world as a whole, but the b’s may use “Hogmanay” with considerably higher frequency, so who knows how the patterns would net out if you don’t have the ability to show different and contrary patterns in different subcorpora matched to the different sorts of speakers.
I’m not sure what you mean by “register.” What register is Hogmanay in, given that it’s the standard name for the day in the regions where it is used?
In other words, in Glasgow “It’s Hogmanay, time to party and look bootylicious” is no more marked than “It’s Easter/Halloween/Christmas, time to party and look bootylicious” would be in, say, NYC.
I read long ago that Manx [hopʰ tθu neː] represented “Hop! It’s the night,” Scottish ta’n oidhche.
If 100% of the uses of “Hogmanay” come out of the mouths of denizens of “the regions where it’s used” and is currently standard and 0% of the uses occur with the world’s remaining Anglophones, perhaps my group a) would be an empty set.
I must say I can’t recall ever hearing someone proposing bootyliciousness (bootyliciosity?) in observance of Easter, but no doubt there are potentially relevant social circles in which I do not move.
The more salient point is that 100% of the uses of “It’s Hogmanay, time to party and look bootylicious for the Bells,” the sentence you were remarking on, came out of the mouth of a denizen of “the regions where it’s used”; I’m not sure how its effect on denizens of elsewhere is relevant except to the psychology of such denizens.
Are there, or were there, people for whom ‘bootylicious’ is unmarked? I’m actually kind of on JWB’s side – although ‘Hogmanay’ is neutral for me, ‘bootylicious’ isn’t, and I would expect someone using that kind of consciously cosmopolitan (for want of a better word coming to mind) vocabulary to steer away from obviously ‘provincial’ words.
(Although ‘bootylicious for the bells’ surprises me less than ‘for Hogmanay’ simply because I had no idea that ‘the bells’ was regional!)
usually known as Novi God (נוֹבִי גוֹד), but it used to be called Silvester (סילבסטר)
that’s fascinating, J1M! do you have a sense of when the tipping point was? i assume it must be related to one of the waves of soviet/post-soviet immigration, but it also seems like it could be part of the rising more-openly-religious* nationalism’s rejection of any nod to an intercommunal shared culture. similarly, i do wonder whether “silvester” was the longstanding term among palestinian jews, or part of a more regionalist/”canaanite” trend in the early zionist lexicon.
.
* there ain’t no such thing as a zionism that isn’t religious (regardless of longstanding pretense) – its entire premise is the divine landgrant, and the jewish nationalists whose project of population concentration & political sovereignty didn’t depend on that theological anchor (the Territorialists) were thrown out of the movement as soon as herzl was too dead to leave with the rest of them.
Are there, or were there, people for whom ‘bootylicious’ is unmarked?
That’s not what I was saying. JWB’s “such different registers that they are unlikely to co-occur” seemed to me (and still seems to me) to strongly imply that both words are marked for register — otherwise, why single out those two words? — and as far as I can tell, “Hogmanay” is marked only for geography.
I guess for me as a non-Scot, there’s a register or something very much like a register that arises when you use markedly out-of-region words. So if an American says “lorry” for truck or “Oshogatsu” for New Year’s, that’s outside the normal/unmarked/default register. And I feel, although not with entire confidence, that if I were to be speaking in a context where it made sense for me to say “lorry” or “Oshogatsu” I would be unusually likely to eschew words from the most informal/slangy register of my usual idiolect. Which may not even contain “bootylicious” unselfconsciously, but that’s the register where that lexeme would live if it were somewhere in my unselfconscious lexical repertoire.
In the interests of not mixing up scientific dialectology with other potentially contentious matters, I am virtuously refraining from even speculatively considering any stereotypes regarding whether Scottish ladies are more or less statistically likely to be bootylicious than ladies of other ethnicities and ancestries. I am in any event confident that there must be some native locution in Braid Scots that’s a local synonym of “bootylicious.”
Separately, now I’m curious about how some transliteration of “Sylvester” for December 31 would have gotten into Modern Hebrew in the first place. Presumably immigration from some part of Europe where that’s what the local goyim called it (with natural deference toward local goyische nomenclature for calendar dates not synched to the traditional Jewish calendar)? For obscure historical reasons, Christians of the Byzantine tradition (and thus most of those living in Israel) commemorate St. Sylvester on Jan. 2 (today!) rather than Dec. 31, and the Greek Patriarchate of Jerusalem is old-calendarist, meaning they currently observe liturgical Jan. 2 on secular/Gregorian Jan.15.
OTOH, presumably the Gregorian calendar began making *some* inroads into present Israeli territory back during Ottoman times,* and perhaps e.g. the more Western-aligned Maronites in Lebanon were a vector for that and in synch with the Vatican calendar and thus contributed the “Sylvester” monicker to Levantine Arabic, whence it could have entered Modern Hebrew?
*It would have become the governing calendar for administrative purposes during the British Mandate, but Brits don’t generally use “Sylvester” as shorthand for Dec. 31.
I grew up in the silvester era. It was considered a distasteful yet popular import from Europe, at a time when Christianity was still considered icky by many. Perusing the Israeli National Library historical newspaper database, I see that the term became popular in the early 1950s, at first often occurring in scare quotes. (One indignant essay in the religious Ha-Tsofeh, from 1954, was entitled “The ‘Moshkes’ are Celebrating Sylvester”. What are מאשקעס?)
(What Zionism is and isn’t is hardly an answerable question. It is indeed the elephant in the room, and the many blind scholars who inspect it each write their own distinct essay on it and the Jewish Question. Let me get my hat and coat, if I may.)
The OED s.v. Sylvester (entry from 1919) says:
It clearly has a strong association with Germany.
At least two of the three OED entries suggest that certain Anglophones referred to Sylvester in much the way certain non-Scots might refer to Hogmanay, i.e. when discussing foreigners and their quaint customs. Although the implication that Sylvesterabend remained current among even Protestant German-speakers may have some relevance to why it would have currency among certain Ashkenazic migrants to British-Mandate Palestine? (Note FWIW that one would assume Sylvester-eve to be Dec. 30 after sunset, so maybe poor translation by Jackson of Strauss?)
As far as I am aware, Silvester is the usual name for December 31st in Germany nowadays, independent of confession. I don’t know whether it used to be limited to Catholic or Lutheran regions previously.
i hadn’t realized Sylvester had such wide currency in germany, but that makes its appearance in ivrit make sense to me, especially with what Y said!
i think “moshke” is a derisive reference to workingclass yiddish-speaking jews, with an implication of secularism, with the slavic diminutive of moyshe/moses (and a touch of “mishke-moshke” [confused, messy], and of herzl’s preferred german anti-jewish pejorative “Mauschel”).
And according to Wiktionary, New Year’s Eve is silvestr in Czech, Silvestro in Esperanto, Saint-Sylvestre in French, szilveszter in Hungarian, sylwester in Polish, and Silvester in Slovak.