Merrily Adrift in English

It’s my native language, so I’ve spoken it for a very long time (some say too long).  Occasionally, however, I can’t just take it for granted, and such is the case with “Merry Christmas”.  I don’t know how often I’ve wished people a “Merry Christmas” this year, let alone in all the years that preceded it; but as I stop to think about it, it seems to me that the word “merry” is on its way out of the language.  Oh, carolers sing “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” every Christmas, but not one in a hundred would know that the title of the carol is a direct address (hence the comma) or that in contemporary English the sentence might best be understood as “May you have God’s blessings”.  Today we might use “merry” disparagingly as in “Even though they knew the idea wouldn’t work, they merrily continued with it.”  If you recall the “Folkies” of the late ‘50s and ‘60s  you may remember as well the “Limelighters” singing “I Saw Esau”.  If the lyrics still stick in your head you might recall that the singer was put out at seeing Esau giving his girl a “merry twirl”, and in this context the word’s usage was quite ambiguous.  It could have meant that Esau was showing her a pleasurable good time of some sort or another, it could have meant that whatever Esau was doing was being accomplished energetically, it could have meant that whatever Esau was doing with his girl was filled with laughter or it could have simply meant that whatever was being done, was being done in high spirits.  One might also hear of someone being led on a “merry chase” (though that likelihood diminishes every year) and in this case the meaning, a brisk chase, is very plain.  How all of this came from the Middle English “merri”, meaning “pleasant”, is all a matter of conjecture; though I’m sure some of the meanings of the word must have been ironic.

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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