I had no intention of doing a Fourth-themed post, but JWB slyly sent me a link to Sophie Hardach’s BBC piece “The Viking word hidden in the Declaration of American Independence,” calling it a “simple but not actually wrong BBC piece on the varied etymologies of the lexemes that ended up in the phrase ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,’ with clickbait Viking headline.” Here’s a sample:
Let’s start with the brief phrase “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”.
“This iconic line is actually a great demonstration of what a mongrel language English is,” says Tom Birkett, a professor of Old English and Old Norse at University College Cork in Ireland.
“Life” is rooted in Old English, a language brought to Britain by Germanic tribes from around AD400-500. “Liberty” and “pursuit” are Latin-rooted, then evolved into French and arrived in Britain with the Norman French conquest in AD1066.
And then there is “happiness”: a word echoing with distant voices telling stories of trolls, battles and seafarers.
“Happiness has an interesting etymology, as it comes from Old Norse happ, meaning ‘fortune’ or ‘good luck’,” says Birkett. “When ’happy’ is first attested in Middle English it means ‘fortunate’, or ‘blessed by good luck’.”
Thanks, JW! And if you’re musically inclined, don’t miss Bill Goldstein’s impassioned paean to Paul Simon’s “American Tune,” which “may actually be Simon’s single greatest work”:
But first, the music. If there’s a sense that the melody, progressions and structure seem more, say, sophisticated, than that of a typical pop song, it’s due to the fact that Simon, in effect, had a noteworthy collaborator in its creation: the composition was based on a chorale by Johann Sebastian Bach (only a songwriting genius like Simon would dare to co-compose with Bach). The simple grace of the restrained arrangement warmly envelops the experience of hearing it, and is highlighted, for me, by the rising strings as you enter the third verse, initiating a whole other¹ part of the song. Normal mortals try to write catchy, quality songs, but legends like Simon, McCartney and Elton John are able to readily create two distinct, brilliant sections and just combine them into the same one. The result here is at once transcendent and, perhaps in its imagery, even hallucinatory. Man, those strings; if you listen to this passage (beginning with “And I dreamed I was dying”) and really focus on them, you may well get chills or tears (or both). Simon, it seems clear, is a master of the secular hymn.
I just wish Goldstein hadn’t felt compelled to include this snotty, ignorant footnote:
¹In how many conversations in your life have you heard someone state some variant of “that’s a whole nother thing”? Nother is, in a word, not a word. Please address anyone you observe saying this, as I annoyingly do, by asking “a whole what thing?” and watch their discomfort grow as it dawns on them that they’re heedlessly using a made-up word. Dear readers, help me rid the world of the scourge of “nother.”
Dear readers, help me rid the world of the scourge of prescriptivism.
Surely the most obvious Viking word in the Declaration is “they/their/them.”
Nother is, in a word, not a word
Goldstein is absolutely right. I’ve also noticed that people are increasingly saying “adder” instead of “nadder” and “orange” instead if “norange.” I blame infantilisation, the Scourge of our Era.
And they talk about “aprons.” I don’t know what the world’s coming to.
It’s not even Bach’s melody! He took a pre-existing sturdy hymn tune and wrote new harmonies that work fine but are not a work of inexplicable genius. And before Simon used the tune it had been already been adopted in-or-before the Sixties to generic pinko-folkie lyrics by very pedestrian hands (or feet?). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITXCxwtXKwE
Oh, I thought Happiness was a Hittite verb, meaning to get rich. See David Michael Weeks’ Ph.D. thesis, An Anatolian Appendix to Buck’s Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages (UCLA, 1985).
generic pinko-folkie lyrics by very pedestrian hands
In regard to Dylan’s Nobel, I chanced on a claim that Philip Roth’s actual response was “That’s fine! I hope that next year, they give it to Peter, Paul and Mary.”
I have not investigated further, in case it turns out not to be true.
I thought Happiness was a Hittite verb
Alas, this is merely a folk etymology.
In fact, “happiness” derives from the root hab- of Nawdm Habr, itself a loan from Kabiyè. The dictionary tells us:
“Réjouissance organisée par les hommes. Elle se prépare à la veille par la consommation de “daragr” et se le lendemain par une danse au cours de laquelle les hommes se déguisent et démontrent leurs forces mystiques.”
(I think something has gone wrong with the French; I imagine the lexicographer had had a bit too much daragr.)
The song’s off-hand reference to Ms. Liberty is elaborated here:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/07/02/arts/design/statue-of-liberty-history-france-us.html?unlocked_article_code=1.vFA.ozB2.PerXKq5vNz9J&smid=url-share
I thought Happiness was a Hittite verb
However, we can all agree that happiness is a warm Hittite verb.
The song’s off-hand reference to Ms. Liberty is elaborated here
That’s an absolutely terrific piece I recommend to all and sundry (and have been sending around). Those “interactive” doohickies are amazing, and this is one of their best.
I learned a lot of things; for instance, I had no idea Gustave Eiffel was involved.
I recently learned that unlike nadder and napron, norange is unattested in English. The loss of initial n must have occurred in one of the Romance languages, probably an Italian dialect.
Goldstein’s prescriptivism is one thing, but what really bothers me about “nother is, in a word, not a word,” is that “not a word” is not one word!
An excellent point!
Perhaps Roth understandably uttered some bitchy things to third parties on the occasion of Dylan’s Nobel award, but he sent a perfectly respectful and literary email to Dylan, which was somehow intercepted by Amy Rigby who then recorded it and performed it as a song titled “From Philiproth@gmail to rzimmerman@aol.com.” I think she boldly claimed the songwriting credit, as if daring Roth to sue her for the royalties.
Transcription here: https://genius.com/Amy-rigby-from-philip-roth-to-r-zimmerman-lyrics
Reasonably competent live performance (with her husband on bass) here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2S7cTb-Cmvc
But here’s the thing about the Paul Simon number. The number of potential Paul Simon record buyers who knew the Peter Paul and Mary pinko-folkie use of the tune and/or the Bach version you might hear on fancy/schmancy classical radio stations was as of 1973 probably significantly less than the number of normal-Americans who knew it as a standard hymn tune, and a hymn tune very specifically linked to Good Friday services.* (In a U.S. context that would have been your Lutherans and Episcopalians and maybe some chunk of Methodists and also a decent chunk of Catholics once you got to Vatican 2 and a willingness to dip into Protestant hymnals for ideas). Now, I accept that Paul Simon himself when growing up in Queens did not typically go to church on Good Friday, so I don’t know whether or not he was aware of this very well-known use of the tune (plus Bach’s harmonies) when he wrote his version. But someone like Goldstein who purports to be doing Simon scholarship ought to have been aware of that, you would think?
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_Sacred_Head,_Now_Wounded The English words I personally think of as standard/normative are those of the Robert Bridges translation but I accept that other translations may have more market share in the world of U.S. Protestant hymnody.
So e.g. here’s an Australian version of the hymn done under weird circumstances during the bizarre spring of 2020 when the government was in the process of shutting down churches. A quite limited complement of singers, socially distanced from each other in the vast emptiness of the (Anglican) catheral in Sydney. I guess under non-pandemic circumstances they might sing Simon’s lyrics if you paid them to?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzoj_QrSwxc
em no. One of those is not on a par with the others.
Amy Rigby
Amy Rigby merits respect from all right-thinking people for (among other things) her album title Diary of a Mod Housewife.
One of those is not on a par with the others.
McCartney? I don’t know, though; he does have his advocates …
That’s an absolutely terrific piece
It is!
There you have the confidence-trick that is America.
All “nations” are confidence tricks; they do vary somewhat in the width of the chasm between the myth and reality, but the chasm is always there.
One can see that “Statue of Liberty” is going to be more appealing as a name than “Empty Shell of Liberty.”
Shockingly, this also reveals that that iconic scene at the end of Planet of the Apes is not at all realistic.
As a musically sophisticated individual, I have a very clear view of how Paul Simon, Paul McCartney, and Elton John rank as composers. However, I would not necessarily expect anyone to agree with me. I don’t know whether my opinion would be considered common sense or off the wall.
There you have the confidence-trick that is America.
Yes, because any honest, aboveboard country would only have statues made of good, solid, honest marble that would sink any ship that tried to transport them.
*rolls eyes*
Blame the French. They built it, anyway.
Tom Birkett is I think the first person mentioned here I have met in real life. A great honour for him. We only spoke on neutral topics; I thought he was a mere historian rather than an actual philologist.
As we know in hindsight, so did the Trojan horse.
Y: Blame the French. They built it, anyway.
I say no more.
Me: I say no more
… except this: The copper for the cladding came from Vigsnes kobberverk at Visnes, Karmøy, Norway. Visnes is close to Avaldsnes, the center of Viking age royal power in Norway. If New York suddenly finds itself pillaged by Norse hordes in pursuit of their constitutional happ, you know why.
All “nations” are confidence tricks
And as I recently pointed out elsewhere in a similar context, all “nations,” when you go back far enough, are founded on murder.
Quite so. I wish we could get out of the “big man”/nation/war trap we always seem to find ourselves in.
@J.W. Brewer:
But isn’t Bach the reason why this tune is such a Good Friday standard?
The tune is of course much older, and it should be credited to poor Hans Leo Hassler, who composed it and published it in 1601 as the secular song “Mein G’müt ist mir verwirret.”
The first printing as a hymn was in 1613 with Christoph Knoll’s text “Herzlich tut mich verlangen” (a digital copy is on IMSLP). The Zahn catalog (Die Melodien der deutschen evangelischen Kirchenlieder, in the Internet Achive) has it as tune No. 5385a with this text and rhythm.
With the same text, Johann Crüger printed in 1640 (in his Neues vollkömliches Gesangbuch, online in the Digitale Historische Bibliothek Erfurt/Gotha) a slight rhythmical rearrangement, which Bach adopted. I’ve never heard Hassler’s original rhythm, but I’ve hardly had any exposure to Lutheran liturgy.
Zahn lists a few other hymns the tune was used for early on, before concluding:
When Crüger first published “Befiehl du deine Wege” in 1653 (fifth edition of Praxis Pietatis Melica, online in the Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek), he pointed to the different tune for “Lobet Gott, unsern Herren” (Zahn 5393), which seems to remain well attested as another tune for this hymn in German hymnals up to the present day. I couldn’t figure out when the tune switch first occurred, though of course Bach’s St Matthew Passion already had it in 1727.
When Crüger first published “O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden” in 1656 (sixth edition of Praxis Pietatis Melica; an image from a subsequent printing is on Wikipedia) he did point to this tune, calling it “Herzlich tut mich verlangen” as he’d previously published it.
Of at least these three mainstream German options, why is the tune very specifically associated in English with the Passion hymn “O sacred Head, now wounded”? Perhaps because Gerhardt is “Germany’s greatest hymn writer” according to Wikipedia. Perhaps, however, because Bach’s St Matthew Passion uses the tune for four chorales to text from “O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden” (plus one to “Befiehl du deine Wege”). I’d be curious to know how popular the hymn and tune were in English-speaking churches before the Bach Revival.
Still sung today, including (as hinted above) in Catholic churches.
Those fireworks in the distance? Prescriptivist heads going off.
““Liberty” and “pursuit” are Latin-rooted, then evolved into French and arrived in Britain with the Norman French conquest in AD1066.”
As phrased, not technically wrong I guess, but it rather obscures the fact that these words — like so very many others — don’t seem to have been adopted into English until the late 14th-c. or later. The phrasing here evokes Ivanhoe-esque Norman masters imposing their imperious words on the poor English peasantry. The reality is that a highly bilingual educated class three hundred years after William did his all-thatting thought it was fashionable to pepper their English with French. I think not unlike a lot of Europeans today use English (sometimes to the point that you hear sentences that have Dutch, German, English, etc., grammatical elements but entirely English lexical ones).
OK, even that’s an oversimplification, because French influence does start even a bit before the Conquest, and we get a fair number of well-established loans already by the start of the 13th-c., and the loans are mediated through a fairly complicated and shifting landscape of what is probably better called Anglo-French. At least, I’m persuaded by Rothwell’s arguments on this.* (You sometimes read that French influence shifted from Norman in the immediate post-Conquest period to Parisian by Chaucer’s day. This has enough elements of truth to it to make it popular in History of English classes — it’s easy to teach and to illustrate — but it’s all a good deal messier than that in reality.)
*He’s written on the subject a fair amount, and I sometimes mix up which points he makes where, but I think I’d recommend “Arrivals and departures: The adoption of French terminology into Middle English” (English Studies 79.2, pp. 144-165) as hitting most of the highlight arguments.
Language Hat quoted Rothwell on Anglo-French in a 2004 post. “Arrivals and Departures” and other Rothwell papers are at the Publications page of the Anglo-Norman Dictionary site.
Re “liberty”, the earlier attested Anglo-French sense is “privilege, a right granted by prescription or charter: ” By the time I have found the word cited in English, the other sense is also in Anglo-Norman. In Dublin, there are the Liberties, where the residents were granted exemption from municipal laws and taxes. I think this stems from the “privilege” sense.
To Giacamo P.’s question re “before the Bach Revival” I don’t know how many capital-R Revivals there may have been. But probably after the one the internet is telling me was fomented in 1829 by Mendelsohn. The usual story is that translations of German-texted Lutheran hymns first became a significant element in the common repertory of Anglophone Protestant hymnody due to the efforts of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Winkworth in the 1850’s and 1860’s. She was working roughly simultaneously with e.g. John Mason Neale’s efforts to turn medieval Latin and Byzantine Greek texts into singable English hymns, and I suspect there were some common ambient cultural factors that contributed to the success of both styles of translational effort.
In addition to the literary or devotional quality of Winkworth’s translations from German I assume there was also something appealing to church musicians of the time about the German melodies and their traditional “chorale” harmonizations, which feel a bit stylistically distinct from the “native British” hymn tunes usually matched with 18th-century texts by Watt or Wesley etc. The Bach who wrote four-part hymn arrangements that can be competently sung by an average amateur parish choir is in a literal historical sense the same Bach who produced the Goldberg Variations or what have you that require quite considerable amount of technical training and expertise to pull off, but I’m not sure if they were entirely “the same Bach” in terms of when and where they had cultural resonance in Anglo societies.
But really my point here is that when I hear Paul Simon singing “American Tune” I’m sort of subconsciously expecting him to start the next verse with e.g. “in thy most bitter passion,” whether or not he intended to plant that subconscious expectation.
Separately, “American Tune” has not attracted as many high-profile cover versions as certain other Paul Simon compositions have, but there’s an intriguing a capella version on the debut album of the Starland Vocal Band, best known for their own “secular hymn” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afternoon_Delight. Simon may not think it’s as good as Aretha Franklin’s not-entirely-secular-feeling version of “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” but that’s a demanding benchmark.
SVB: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKfL9IZnsg8
And speaking of Vikings, as we were, here’s 1974’s “Americas Sang,” with Paul Simon’s lyrics translated into Norwegian (don’t know which sort, don’t know how loose/free the translation is) by Terje Mosnes and sung by a fellow who was apparently a stalwart of the Norwegian hit parade back then. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TBajYiVGUE Not IMHO as powerful a performance as the David-Bowie-in-Swedish offerings of Anni-Frid Lyngstad, but a different vibe which some may prefer.
ktschwarz, I had no idea those articles were all free through the AND! That’s fantastic. I can usually get these things through my university, but I try never to take that for granted.
Stein Ingebrigtsen was part of a wave of folk-pop with Norwegian lyrics in the late sixities and early seventies. Terje Mosnes wrote or translated lyrics for many of the artists.
When I became aware of popular music in the late seventies, Stein Ingebrigtsen was catering to the tapes-sold-at-gas-stations audience with a svensktopp sound. Terje Mosnes went on to become a music journalist and columnist in Dagbladet, specializing on jazz. I recently learned that he also wrote the lyrics for the official supporter song for the Norwegian team at the 1994 World Cup. I did enjoy his column Sleivspark “miskick; snide remark” during the ’94 and ’98 tournaments, where he “used his own advanced software model Chauvi-9” to make over-the-top optimistic predictions.
For some good Norwegian language versions of international superhits, I’ll suggest the 1993 anthology Cohen på norsk (Spotify link for the handy list), especially the three first songs. All lyrics translated by Håvard Rem.
the official supporter song for the Norwegian team at the 1994 World Cup.
Was that stuff as inane as what used to be produced for such occasions in Germany? A fine specimen from 1978. (Udo Jurgens was a singer with a great voice and range who unfortunately sang a lot of tripe, because that’s what people buy. And the German national team should have ficused on playing football…)
Gott im Himmel. I could only listen to a few seconds of that before backing out with a feeling of nausea.
In the U.S., we only allow professional athletes to perform musically on very special occasions. E.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnwmxJ6RDHw
any honest, aboveboard country would only have statues made of good, solid, honest marble that would sink any ship that tried to transport them.
The “70 and 80” tonnes seem not to have sunk whatever ship got them To The Lighthouse.
I wouldn’t put money on the Statue of Liberty lasting 1,600 years; the USA far less of surviving the tin-plate dictator.
Thanks, J.W. Brewer.
I presume Mendelssohn’s is the only capital-R Bach Revival. It seems intuitive given that old J.S. has never been taken off his pedestal ever since.
If Lutheran chorales blossomed in Anglophone churches only after Catherine Winkworth, my suspicions that Bach and Mendelssohn must have played a crucial role in this blossoming are very much confirmed.
The first edition of her translations with tunes attached to the hymns is The Chorale Book for England (1863, in the Internet Archive). Its first co-editor William Sterndale Bennett was a personal friend of Felix Mendelssohn’s, the founding president of the Bach Society in London and the conductor of the first English performance (April 6, 1854) of the St Matthew Passion, his own edition of which he also published in 1862. The second co-editor was surely the Otto Goldschmidt with a Wikipedia page: a pupil of Mendelssohn’s, the founder of the Bach Choir and the conductor of the first complete English performance (April 26, 1876) of Bach’s Mass in B minor.
It seems hard to come up with any people more central to the Bach Revival in Britain. I’m pretty sure that to them there was only one J.S. Bach. They were certainly promoting both his choral and his instrumental music: Wikipedia particularly credits Bennett with fighting the popular impression of his British contemporaries that Bach’s chamber music was too difficult to appreciate. Since both were also concert pianists, they must also have played the Goldberg Variations and all that, though I haven’t bothered to research if they played them in concert or only privately.
Sure enough, the influence of Bach and Mendelssohn shows up in their Editors’ Preface. I’ll take the liberty of quoting it at length.
Needless to say, their Chorale Book has both the hymn (51. “A wounded Head that bearest”) and the tune (XL. — „Herzlich thut mir verlangen.” „O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden”) as its first entry for Good Friday. The second is “Herzliebster Jesu, was hast du verbrochen” and it cannot be coincidence these are also, respectively, the most recurring (and eventually the last) and the first chorale in Bach’s St Matthew Passion. To be fair, the third Good Friday hymn provided is “Da Jesus an dem Kreuze stund,” which Bach merely set as a four-part chorale (BWV 1089) and as an organ chorale prelude (BWV 621).
If mainline Protestant congregations in the US in the past half century have been singing four-part chorales, I’m very impressed (I’ve never heard a Catholic congregation sing anything but monody, though our Cathedral’s professional choir treats us to weekly motets and the occasional polyphonic Mass) and I’d be interested in checking whose four-part arrangement they most commonly use.
Finally, and leaving the rabbit hole I was interested in: I’m sort of subconsciously expecting Simon & Garfunkel (more so than solo Simon) to end up modulating to “Wenn ich einmal soll scheiden.” From a superficial understanding of Paul Simon’s biography, I reckon there’s a fair chance he may also have been more familiar with Bach’s Passions than with mainline Protestant Good Friday services of the present day. I’m wholly unqualified to guess how aware he may have been that the opposite would be true for many of his listeners.
The point of the Statue of Liberty being hollow is that there’s a staircase inside. You can go up, look out, feel free, and experience the whole “enlightening the world” thing.
Wikipedia:
I walked up that staircase when I were a lad, and it was an impressive experience.
Anyone who’s played Deus Ex knows this. 😀
When I were a lad and I guess hat were an undergraduate, I walked up that staircase to the inside of the crown in the company of my maternal grandparents, when my grandma was not too much older than I am now. I have yet to replicate that with any of my own kids, not least because of the bureaucratic hassle and alleged need for advance reservations . Maybe next year …
To Giacomo’s July 6 question: this is a pdf of the version in the 1940 hymnal of the Prot. Episc. Ch., which is probably substantially the same as that carried forward into the 1982 edition. It does note that as an alternative to the four-part arrangement it can be sung in unison, so practice will vary from parish to parish and frankly even within a given parish where those who do not feel personally competent to sing the harmony part most suitable for their own voice will just stick to the melody. https://hymnary.org/hymn/HPEC1940/75