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What's Inside
March, 2008
How our emotional states have changed
The Word Nerd
Howard Richler
We all wish to be happy and avoid being sad. Right? Well it was not always so.
Until the 15th century the greatest wish of our English ancestors was to be silly; actually not silly but “seely,” as it was rendered at the time, which referred to a happy, fortunate and auspicious state of affairs. Over time the meaning of silly degraded to mean “innocent,” “deserving of pity,” “insignificant,” and finally, “foolish.”
This naturally created a void in the language. Some transcendent souls could aspire to religious states such as bliss, felicity, and ecstasy. The latter etymologically refers to a separation of the soul from the body, of being out of one’s mind. Perhaps the well-heeled could expect higher echelons of being and this emotion was covered by words such as the defunct “fain,” or “joyful,” “glad,” “cheerful” and “merry.” “Merry” came into Old English with the meaning of “pleasant” and came to mean “jolly” in the 14th century. Alas, for the common churl, all he could hope for in the word “silly” was a state of contentment, which by the 15th century no longer bore this connotation.
Enter “happy.” This was a derivative of the word “hap” that originally connoted chance, both good and bad, and only later came to refer exclusively to good fortune. With the weakening of the word “silly,” the English language required an adjective that expressed a statement of contentment, as opposed to one of unmitigated joy, and “happy” filled this slot. As it happened, the word “happen” was originally an adjective referring to good fortune, but with the upsurge of “happy,” “happen” transformed into a verb to describe the occurrence of events. The fortune sense of “hap” lives on in the words “haphazard” and “hapless.”
“Sad,” the antithesis of “happy,” has also shifted in meaning. It started its life in the ninth century and its original meaning was “satisfied,” in the sense of having one’s fill, or of being weary of something. For example, an early 13th century sermon relates, “Ich am noht giet sad of mine sinnes, and forthine mai ich hie noht forlete.” (I’m not yet tired of my sins, so I can’t give them up.) It then acquired senses of “strong,” “constant,” “trustworthy” and “grave”. By the end of the 14th century, “sad” had acquired a meaning of “sorrowful”, which probably represents the earliest synonym for the modern sense of “sad” and is found in Beowulf in the 8th century with the spelling “sorhfull.” The sense of “sad” as “deplorably bad” only developed in the late 17th century.
Aside from “sorrowful,” the adjectives “wretched,” “forlorn,” and “woebegone” predate the use of “sad” to denote an unhappy demeanor.
The word melancolie is found in Old French in 1180 with the sense of “profound sadness” and in 1256 as a medical condition. Derived from Greek, it literally means “black bile,” which was believed to cause an unhappy temperament. By the end of the 14th century, the adjective “melancholy” was used in English to denote being unhappy.
Sad to say, this article is over.
Howard Richler’s latest book is Can I Have a Word With You?
