Then there is “Happy New Year”. I’ve been wishing people ‘Happy New Year’ all week without a look into the origin of “happy”. Though we most often use the word to express an emotion, we also use it in other ways (“there was a happy outcome”), so I’ve been driven again to the dictionary (several, in fact). To the best of my understanding, “happy” has its origin in the Middle English “haps”, meaning fortune or chance (derived, in turn, from the Old Norse “happ”). Though no one has ever used “haps’ in any conversation with me, one of the continuing characters in American writer James Lee Burke’s “Dave Robichaux” mystery series regularly asks Dave, “What’s the haps?” If his idiomatic usage (the novels are set in southern Louisiana) is anything other than the author’s overt contrivance (oops, there’s another middle english verb, ‘vert’), then, perhaps (darn, there’s “haps”cropping up again) the original use of the word continues in some parts of the English speaking world At any rate, by the end of the Middle Ages “happy” had come to mean “favored by fortune”, and this seems to be the meaning originally intended when someone wished someone else a “Happy New Year”; that is, a year favored by good fortune. With my research complete, I can now comfortably, merrily and happily, wish all of you a somewhat belated Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
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