Fiction Daily

FIGURATIVELY SPEAKING

Who says FD doesn’t have the holiday spirit?

Darn it, of course we do. The season isn’t about presents, after all, it’s about words.

So today, FD takes a jingle-infested sleigh ride through a few holiday words. Disclaimer: Without intending to offend, looking under the surface may reveal the holiday’s pagan roots.

Let’s start with yule. Other than rhyming with mule, why do we use this word to describe Christmas?

Yule comes to us from the Old english geol, which means Christmas Day. It may have arrived via the Old Norse jol, which was used to describe a heathen festival lasting 12 days … later referred to as Christmas.

Our very own Christmas trees come to us from the old Celtic traditions of communing with spirits in the woods. And the evergreen trees, such as fir, pines and holly, symbolize eternal life. For an interesting review of the custom, visit the Christmas Tree Farm Network. Here’s an excerpt

King Tut never saw a Christmas tree, but he would have understood the tradition which traces back long before the first Christmas, says David Robson, Extension Educator, Horticulture with the Springfield Extension Center.

Legend has it that Martin Luther began the tradition of decorating trees to celebrate Christmas.

Meanwhile, in a surprising turn for the Merry Christmas word police, those fanatics who object to the term “holiday” on so-called religious grounds, threatening to boycott stores who don’t stick to their script … it’s interesting to note that word holiday is actually quite sanctified.

Holiday comes to us from the Old English haligdoeg, or “holy day.”

A perfect word for the season, that represents the sacred and yet can be used by everyone. Now that’s the true spirit of Christmas.

FIGURATIVELY SPEAKING

What could be worse than evil. Just the sound of this word gives a shiver, hits like a punch in the belly, brings darkness.

It’s no accident that a word like evil sounds so, well, evil. Often the sound of a word and its meaning develop hand in hand. As I have mentioned here before, often it’s the Germans who give us words whose meaning and sounds are related.

So with evil.

This word arises from the old English yfel which is of Germanic origin. It’s related to the Dutch euvel and the German Ubel (umlaut on the u).

Evil as an adjective means profoundly immoral and malevolent. It also refers to a force of spirit that embodies the forces of the devil, as well as something harmful or extremely unpleasant.

As a noun, evil means profound immorality, wickendenss and depravity, especially when regarded as a supernatural force.

There is a sense with evil that it is outside of us … a force embodied in the concept … almost a super-human being, a powerful ghost, a destructive phantom.

The dictionary also lists these uses… the best-selling phrases you might say:

the evil eye
the Evil One (Satan)
put off the evil day (or hour) (to postpone)
speak evil of (slander)

We also have the adverb evilly and noun evilness, along with evildoer and evil-minded.

You may think evil is somehow related to our words vile and villain – they’re not. Both are words of Latin origin via the French.

FIGURATIVELY SPEAKING

OK, so I have a secret identity. In a parallel world I am a French nerd. In junior high and high school, and later in college and grad school, French was The Great Escape. As a 14-year old in first-year French class, I salivated over the music and painting, dreamed of visiting Versailles and the City of Light. You can imagine … I spent my childhood playing in tobacco barns … teenage years in eastern North Carolina … you get the picture.

Eventually I lived in my beloved France and treasure those years as a French nana, or gal, and friends with my copains and a few guys, or mecs.

Still, while my high-school classmates were enjoying a rich social life … boyfriends, cheerleading, football games and your basic teenage-fun-type activities, I was conjugating all 16 forms of irregular verbs in an old-school exercise known as the schema.

Schema in French gives us the word “schematic” and “scheme” — but in the langue natale, it refers to the laborious outline of verbs in all tenses, forms and modes. The conditional and subjunctive, too … and if you’ve ever studied French, you know the subjunctive mode makes grown mecs cry for their mommies.

So, looking at this word in our native language shows a common origin in Romance languages and our Anglo-Saxon one: Scheme comes from the Latin schema from the Greek skhema for form or figure.

In the 16th-century, the word was used to describe a diagram of the position of celestial objects, giving rise to the shorter forms, diagram and outline.

Of course we’re all familiar with the more pejorative use of the word as in What are those office malcontents scheming now?

A schemer is a person who is involved in making secret or underhanded plans, and is often associated with pettiness and meanness.

Now, I have to admit, I actually like the word scheme. It implies deep thought and planning. Never mind that it has acquired the negative connotation. Besides, sometimes we all need to do a little scheming. Especially when we’re making up for lost time.

FIGURATIVELY SPEAKING

Today, a few words that arise for no reason at all but to give us joy.

LAGNIAPPE. Something given as a bonus or gift. From the Louisiana French, from Spanish la napa

MACADAM. Broken stone of even size used in compacted layers for roads and paths, typically bonded with tar or bitumen. After the BritisH surveyor John McAdam (1756 – 1836) who advocated using this material.

BITUMEN. Speaking of which … is a black viscous mixture derived as a result of petroleum distillation. From the late Middle English and Latin.

GEMINATE. Consisting of identical adjacent speech sounds, especially consonants, doubled. From the Latin geminatus from “double, pair with.” We know it as Gemini.

ESCHATOLOGY. An area of theology concerned with death, judgment and the soul. From the Greek eskhatos, “last” + -ology.

FIGURATIVELY SPEAKING FRIDAY

One of my favorite topics: CANDY.

I only mention it because of a word that found its way into a commentary I just finished: fondant.

Mmmmm … just makes your mouth water to hear the word.

No? OK, it’s a frou-frou word that may not be the first thing you think of when you lust for sweets.

For those of you who know fondant … then, enough said. Fondant is a mixture of sugar and water, that’s often used in cake decorating. It’s also the term for small candies of a similar composition.

Here’s where the mouth-watering starts. Making fondant candy is a very painstaking labor, requiring careful measuring, mixing, heating and working the paste to just the right texture. No cutting corners here.

All of that hard labor pays off with a dense ratio of sugar to water, so the delicious amalgam is neither liquid nor solid — but something marvelously in-between.

It can be rolled and draped in melt-away sheets over cakes, or formed into small balls for candy dishes.

Though you may not know the word, you’d probably recognize fondant if you tasted it. Fondant can be found in chocolate bonbons — it’s the yummy creme inside flavored orange, cherry or maple.

Like so many cooking terms, fondant comes from the French word fondre, “to melt.” Literally, the word fondant means “melting” — it is the present participle of fondre.

So when you reach for that irresistible morsel that seems to wither as soon as you touch it, you’ve probably got your hands on authentic fondant. Now go ahead and eat it before it melts away into nothingness!

Image is from Pink Cake Box and the orange ribbon on the middle layer is fondant.