by Kevin Burton
Christmas brings with it a combination of the most modern of gifts under the tree and the most old-timey of words used to sing about it.
Merriam-Webster dictionary has compiled a list of words we seldom encounter outside of Christmas songs. We bring you more of those today, and we finish with one from New Year’s Eve. Pretty much all of them are soaked in nostalgia:
Hark
Hark and its older cousin hearken mean “to listen.” Hark is most famously used in the Christmas carol “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” the first line of which could be restated as “Listen to the messenger angels who are singing.” Hark is usually used, as it is here, in the imperative, as a command.
Both hark and hearken are still in current use in the phrases hark back to or hearken back to, which mean “to return to or remember (something in the past)” or “to look or seem like (something in the past).” These terms have mostly lost the literal meaning of “listen,” replacing it with “remember.” They derive from the call “hark back,” formerly used when hunting with dogs, meaning to return along the path or retrace the route when a scent is lost. The current meaning derives from the metaphor of seeking an earlier path.
Deck
The verb deck in “Deck the Halls With Boughs of Holly” means “to decorate,” and it also sounds like a shortening of decorate, which would make it similar to the pairs hark/harken and yon/yonder and yule/yuletide. Especially when used in poetry and songs, a single-syllable version of a word is a common enough phenomenon in English. But, oddly enough, this deck is unrelated to decorate, since deck comes from the Dutch word meaning “to cover” and decorate comes from the Latin word meaning “ornament.”
Other than in the old-fashioned Christmas song, we don’t see deck very much in contemporary English except in the phrase decked out, meaning “dressed or decorated in a fancy way.”
Don
In “Deck the Halls” we encounter the line:
Don we now our gay apparel
The verb don here means “to put on (an article of clothing).” The archaic nature of this particular word may be related to the oddness of the entire line in the lyric: first, the placement of the adverb now after the verb is formal and archaic sounding, and gay apparel seems like a very self-consciously poetic way to say “party clothes.”
But despite being redolent of an older kind of English, don is still used today when putting on an article of clothing is something other than just getting dressed for the day in your usual way:
don a uniform
don a costume
don a mask
Don is actually a contraction of “do on,” a bit like only is a shortened form of “one-ly” (meaning “alone” or “sole”). There is a corresponding term meaning “to remove an article of clothing”: doff comes from contracting “do off.” It’s still used in the phrase “to doff one’s hat,” removing one’s hat as a gesture of politeness or respect.
Yore
Yore means “of the past,” and that idea is what connects all these words from the lyrics of Christmas songs. They seem to reflect some version of the old days, whether the song is itself from Merry Olde England like “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” or written in America during the 1940s like “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”:
Once again, as in olden days
Happy golden days of yore
It’s interesting to note that the nostalgia and yearning for the old days and folks from home mentioned in so many Christmas standards has itself been superimposed over the feelings of separation experienced by soldiers and their families during WWII, which is when several of the best-known ones were composed, including “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” but also “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” and, of course, “White Christmas.”
And even though feelings of nostalgia are universal, not everyone is familiar with yore, which is sometimes sung as yours. And although we don’t doubt that you’ve known your share of “golden days,” this song, like all of these Christmas season tunes, is about a more generalized (and less specific) idea of the past.
Ye
When we encounter ye, we recognize it as a word that makes any song title or lyric sound old-fashioned. It’s the kind of vocabulary that we understand but rarely produce when speaking—except in very specific phrases, such as “Hear ye! Hear ye!” or in the songs “O Come, All Ye Faithful” and “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen.” Ye means you, obviously, but only the plural you.
Originally the pronouns ye and you were used along with thee and thou to refer to people in the second person, ye and you for plural and thee and thou for singular. By the 1600s, you had displaced not only thee and thou but also ye, becoming the second person pronoun for both singular and plural. (This is why thee and thou also sound archaic to us, which makes some people mistake them for a more formal kind of pronoun, but, in fact, thee and thou were the informal, intimate pronouns and you the more formal one.)
There’s a funny thing about ye when you see it not as a pronoun referring to a person, but as an article replacing the, as in Ye Olde Candy Shoppe. This comes from the now-obsolete runic letter called the thorn, used for spelling the th combination; since the thorn looked a bit like the letter y, it’s often transcribed that way today.
If we use the thorn, the looks like þe. Seek and ye shall find the old spelling.
Auld lang syne
The end of the Christmas season for many is New Year’s Eve, and the saying auld lang syne, from the poem and the song, is heard and seen everywhere.
The words are from Scots, the variety of English spoken in Scotland, and literally mean “old long ago” or “old long since.” The phrase is used to mean “the good old times” that we reflect upon at New Year’s. It’s a meta way to refer to the “old times” with an expression that is itself redolent of older forms of English.
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