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.