It Goes Back Centuries!

I've been thinking about words.  Let's face it, despite the variety of our modern lives - or, indeed maybe because of it - they are probably the most common things we have around us ... and that is surely true whether they are in our native tongue, one we've learned at school or since, or one in some foreign language we've never seen before.  Words are words, and we see them on every side.

From time to time I've seen 'tests' on social media that give credence to a calculated claim that the inside of words is far less important than the combination of their length, context and their initial and final letters.  Indeed, a tweet this morning provided me with two examples of this very fact.  It was actually a reply to one I'd spotted yesterday but which, being puzzled by it and unable to understand its point, I had passed over.  Yesterday's section of the story concerned a supermarket's in-store sign showing a glass of milk and the two words 'Lleath' and 'Milk', with the caption 'Another entrant to the milk war!'.  This morning's response cited another sign (no picture this time), saying 'I had a similar argument with <name of national supermarket chain> over Psygod!'

Now, in my travels, I've been into stores in both Scotland and Wales and have seen many signs like this that are written in both English and either Gaelic or Welsh, and the fact that I've now been learning Welsh on and off for three or four years, meant that the words for milk and fish are common to me.  Hence, my puzzlement why there should be consternation over a milk sign bearing both languages.  This morning, however - fish being less common in my lessons than milk - I suddenly realised that 'Psygod' should read 'Pysgod', and I looked back at 'last night's milk'.  Sure enough, it should have read 'Llaeth', and the meaning of the exchange became crystal clear.

Geography isn't the only thing that affects words and their use.  History must bear its share of the blame for word-confusion.  This morning, shortly after reading that second tweet, I was planning what turned out to be quite a busy day and caught myself muttering, 'Now let's set these things in order.'  I've read somewhere that a preposition is not the way to end a sentence; whether true or not, it's stuck in my memory ever since I read it and, if true, it would surely apply to the phrase as much as to the single word, so my mind set about re-phrasing what I'd said: 'Now let's set in order these things.'

You can tell that I was only half intent on what I was doing, for my thoughts drifted further down the revision path.  I realised that, if I were to be more economical and say 'Now let us order these things.', it would convey a totally different meaning, i.e. to requisition goods from an outside source, rather than to arrange things - in this case ideas - already in my possession.

That was all to do with the sequence of the same known words.  It's perhaps coincidence that all these thoughts came in the space of about two hours earlier today.  During my early morning prayers, my mind drifted to a line from a hymn, written only in the nineteenth century by John Bacchus Dykes, but using words common a couple of centuries earlier.  I'd sung it often when I was younger, without giving it a second thought, but today's child might be puzzled by the archaic tenses of "Which wert and art and evermore shalt be."

It's time to draw this 'socially distanced' ramble through the textbooks to a close, before I drift off to Norman-French, Anglo-Saxon and Greek.  But let me just explain those three unusual words in that hymn line.  The 'which' at the beginning is a personal reference to God, to whom the whole hymn is presumed to be addressed; until the seventeenth century - and possibly later - it was common to differentiate between singular and plural in the second person.  This is still the case in many languages (French, German and Welsh, to my knowledge) but English became lazy and now uses 'you', 'your', and 'yours' whether we're talking to one or a hundred people.  The words in this hymn are the archaic forms of 'were', 'are' and 'shall' that would have been used with 'thou', the single word for the second person, that has long since fallen out of use.

The moral of my early morning is therefore not just to be careful what you say, but also the order in which you say it ... and how you spell it as well!