If you’re anything like me, you learned as a kid that Christmas is literally “Christ + Mass.” But I’ll admit that as I never understood how or why we pronounce those vowels differently than we do the two words on their own, or (back then) why it’s the one holiday we today still use that formation for (in America…particularly Protestant America.)

So Christ is from the Greek christos, meaning “messiah, savior.” It would have been pronounced like “KREES-tohs.” The i makes a long e sound, and the o is also long. Interestingly, when spoken quickly that ee sound turns into a short i sound. So Christmas actually retains more of the original pronunciation of Christ than, well, Christ does. No long i should be in the word! 😉

Mass, of course, refers to a eucharistic service in the Catholic church (and hence the early church, when the holiday was set). This isn’t just a “church service,” but one in which there is communion; and this one, in particular, is one that honors the birth of Jesus. I have written much about the origins of the Church holiday and how it gained popularity specifically to combat Arianism, which claimed that Jesus was not born the Savior, fully God–that He was instead born fully human, and it wasn’t until His baptism that God gave Him a divine spirit as well. This mass set aside to honor His birth was a deliberate celebration of Jesus being born as the Son of God, fully God and fully man. The celebration was also deliberately escalated, catchy songs written for it, so that the people would cling to that important teaching…and to counteract the catchy tunes that the Arians had written with their own heretical claims.

Word Nerds Merch!

I love to look at the roots of words and guess where they came from. But with reindeer, that’s a rather dangerous thing to do.

If one were to ask me, I probably would have come up with a (feasible, to my mind) story about how these large deer–big enough to pull a sled or sleigh–are hence big enough for reins, and that they clearly got their name because they’re a deer you can hitch up and use like a horse.

I’d have been wrong.

Turns out, this is a false-cognate. The rein in reindeer is actually from the Norse hreinn, which means “antler,” so called because both male and female reindeer have antlers, though the males are bigger and “truly remarkable,” according to one early source. The more ancient root is linked to the Greek krios, which is where ram also comes from.

The word dates to around the 1400s and refers to the type of deer that inhabit the Arctic regions of Europe.

The root of the word, however, has been much confused over the centuries, given how similar it sounds to other words. In the 1600s, the animals had just come into public awareness in England, and so a bunch of pubs popped up using their name…in a variety of ways. Rain-deer, rained-deer, range-deer, and ranged-deer all are recorded.

Word Nerds Merch!

With Thanksgiving behind us but Christmas still ahead, let’s look at some other holiday words that you may never have paused to wonder about! And this week, we’ll start with cranberry.

Do you like cranberries? Cranberry sauce? Cranberry juice? I wouldn’t call them a favorite all on their own, but I love the many uses of the cranberry…especially in my overnight eggnog French toast that I make for Christmas morning every year. (Topped with both cranberries and pecans and streusel and then baked!)

But where did the word come from?

The fruit native to North America was called by the Algonquian tribe popokwa. When European settlers came to America and saw the bright red berries that grew in low, wet areas, they thought they bore a resemblance to a similar fruit in Germany, which was called the kraanbere, literally “crane berry.” Why was it called that? Etymologists scratch their heads a bit over that one, but the best guess is that the plants’ stamens resemble the beaks of cranes.

Early accounts of the berries from the English also called them “bear-berries,” because bears “devour it very greedily.” They likened them to currants. And apparently, cranberry tarts were quite popular. The American cranberry is a bit bigger than the European variety, but those newcomers had no trouble integrating them into their dishes!

I kind love the bear-berry name. Too bad that one didn’t stick around. 😉

Word Nerds Merch!

Did you know that tinsel and stencil are closely related? Yep! The English word for tinsel dates from the mid-1400s, referring specifically to a kind of cloth that had metallic gold or silver thread woven into it. It comes from the Old French estencele, meaning “sparkle” or “spangle.”

By the 1590s, tinsel no longer referred just to sparkly cloth, but to thing strips of shiny metal in general (like those gold or silver threads). But while that original cloth would have been expensive, these small shimmering strips were not…they were flashy but cheap. And so, between 1590 and about 1650, tinsel began to be used figuratively for “superficial glitter, something showy but of little real worth.”

Interestingly, tinsel is also a verb dating from about 1590, meaning exactly what you’d think: “to adorn with tinsel.”

Hollywood has been known as Tinseltown since 1972.

Do you use tinsel in your Christmas decorating? We have one very specific tinsel we put on our tree–it’s an irridiscent white, very shimmery and subtle, and we tear it off it tiny little clumps and put it in front of the lights. Looks liks an opalescent clump of snow.

Word Nerds Merch!