by Roseanna White | Dec 23, 2019 | Word of the Week
(Originally published in 2015)
I am sometimes baffled by how things come into our cultural consciousness…and change over the centuries. Cue the elves.
Elf comes from Germanic folklore, with equivalents in Norse and Saxon mythology. The word itself hasn’t changed much since Old English in spelling, sound, etc.
The meaning, however…
Back then, an elf was considered to be a mean-spirited goblin-like creature with quite a bit of power. Descriptions range from creatures who are merely mischievous to “evil incubus.” Since the mid-1500s, it’s been used figuratively for a mischievous person. They were thought to create knots in hair (oooookay) and hiccups.
Over the centuries, they gradually took on new roles in people’s minds. They were occasionally referred to as “house gnomes,” and while they would act with traditional mischief if not treated properly, they were thought to scare off true evil spirits from your house if you treated them properly–people were known to leave out gifts of food and baubles to appease them.
It wasn’t until the mid-1800s that Scandinavian writers took this ancient tradition and decided it would be fun to apply it to Christmas. Popular writers of the day began crafting stories that assigned elves the new role of being Santa Claus‘s helpers. By this time traditional belief in elves had pretty much fallen away, so people seized this new thought that sort of revived an old belief, but in a nice, cute way. Visual artists joined this new movement and began painting pictures of what we now identify as elves–cute, small, sprite-like creatures who are all goodwill…at least unless a child in naughty, in which case some old mischief might sneak out and cause them to replace goodies in a stocking with switches or lumps of coal.
So there we have it. Elves. 😉
by Roseanna White | Dec 16, 2019 | Word of the Week
And this discovery made me smile. I have to say that most times when I hear the word
jolly, I think of Christmas. Jolly old
St. Nick, jolly elves, etc.
And apparently, that’s a good thing to think of! Though the word comes most immediately from Old French jolif, meaning “festive, amorous, pretty,” there are also suggestions that it’s a loan-word from Germanic tongues, akin to Old Norse jol…which
is the word for their winter feast, i.e. Yule…which is Christmas! How
fun is that? So it’s totally appropriate to think of Christmas when you
hear the word jolly, because it’s related!
Have a holly, jolly Christmas!
by Roseanna White | Dec 9, 2019 | Word of the Week
Today’s
Word of the Week–a revisit of a post from 2014–is less a word and more the etymology of a story.
Because my kids asked me after I went through the original St. Nicholas
story with them, when Rudolph came about, and I had no clue.
As
it turns out, our beloved reindeer was an invention of a writer named
Robert L. May, who was hired by the Montgomery Ward company to create an original piece of work for their annual children’s coloring book. May devised Rudolph in 1939…to some opposition. The publishers didn’t like the red nose idea. Red noses were associated with drunkards, which certainly wasn’t the image they wanted to portray. But when May had his illustrator friend create a cutesy deer character (they decided actual reindeer weren’t cute enough so went with a more familiar-to-Americans white-tailed variety) with a beaming red nose, the powers-that-be relented–and the story took off to amazing success. The original poem was written in the meter of “The Night Before
Christmas.”
The
song we all know and love was written a decade later, by the author’s brother-in-law. It remained the all-time best selling album in the country until the 80s!
The
stop-motion animation version that I grew up thinking was the only
Rudolph story worth watching, LOL, came about in 1964. Though very popular, this movie apparently doesn’t stick very accurately to the original poem. Which now makes me want to look up the original and see what’s been changed!
So there we have it. Our history of Rudolph. 😀
by Roseanna White | Dec 2, 2019 | Word of the Week
 |
| 1922 ad in Ladies’ Home Journal |
Advent is upon us, so I figured I’d go back to my practice of sharing holiday-themed words each Monday. I think I’ve used pretty much all of them at some point or another, but I’ll try to highlight ones I haven’t looked at in a while, at least! This one I originally shared in 2012. =) (And if there’s one you’re curious about and want me to look up, just let me know!)
I
remember, as a child, writing stories and assignments for school around
this time of year and occasionally using the abbreviation “X-mas” for
Christmas. I remember teachers telling me not to use abbreviations in my
assignments, and I remember someone else (can’t recall who) telling me
not to use that one for Christmas because it just wasn’t right to take
Christ out of Christmas (or something to that effect) and replace it
with an X.
So
in my middling years, I refused to use it, thinking it somehow mean to
Jesus…then later I actually learned where it came from.
Pretty simple, really. The Greek word for Christ is Χριστός. You
might notice that first letter. Our X, though it’s the Greek “chi.” No
paganism here, no dark, dastardly scheming to remove Jesus from his
birthday. Scholars started this as a form of shorthand. The first
English use dates to 1755 in Bernard Ward’s History of St. Edmund’s College, Old Hall. Woodward, Byron, and Coleridge, to name a few, have used it to. And interestingly, similar abbreviations date way back. As early as 1100, the form “Xp̄es mæsse” for Christmas was used in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
So.
It’s still an abbreviation and oughtn’t be used in formal writing and
more than w/ or b/c, but it’s also perfectly legitimate as what it is.
Always nice to discover something like that. =)
by Roseanna White | Nov 18, 2019 | Word of the Week
I’ve always loved the word whimsy. For some reason, those “fanciful, fantastic” ideas strike me as pure joy. (Shocking for a novelist, right?)
Interesting, though, that (in my head at least) whimsy and whimsical have good connotations, while whim can carry a more negative one. If we do something on a whim, that could carry a meaning of “caprice” as well.
All of these words, though, come from one I’d never heard of before–they’re a shortening of whimwham.
Of what? Yep. Whimwham. And what, do you ask, is that? Well, back in the 1600s, a whimwham was a fanciful object that was worn as an accessory. Not something useful, but something just meant to be eye-catching. No one’s quite sure where the word came from…but it’s certainly succeeded in creating other words from it!
by Roseanna White | Nov 11, 2019 | Word of the Week
We know the word candid as “truthful, honest, sincere.” It’s carried this meaning since the 1670s. But before that, it carried the meaning of “bright, white” which came from the Latin candere, which means, “to shine.”
I really kind of love this one. Because what shines? The truth. Honesty. Sincerity.
In the 1920s it came to be applied to unposed photographs–presumably, because it’s an honest glimpse of someone or something, rather than a studied, created one.
Roseanna M. White is a bestselling, Christy Award winning author who has long claimed that words are the air she breathes. When not writing fiction, she’s homeschooling her two kids, editing, designing book covers, and pretending her house will clean itself. Roseanna is the author of a slew of historical novels that span several continents and thousands of years. Spies and war and mayhem always seem to find their way into her books…to offset her real life, which is blessedly ordinary.