January literally means “the month of Janus.” So who is Janus?

He was a Roman god of “beginnings, endings, gates, doorways, journeys, transitions, and time.” Easy to see, then, why this mythological being is the one who presides over the first month of the year.

Janus is traditionally depicted as having two faces, one looking forward and the other behind. Though I certainly don’t believe in Janus as a god, I can absolutely appreciate him as a representation of something crucial to the human condition.

Transition and change is a part of life. And though turning over a calendar to a new year is an artificial beginning in some ways, it’s a reminder of something we need to do–maybe not on a given day of the year, but at some point.

We must pause, sometimes, to look at where we’ve come from and where we’re going. When we go through a door, we’re both exiting a place and entering a new one. Each beginning is also an ending–and each ending a new beginning. When we set off to go to one place, we’re leaving another.

Throughout these changes and transitions, both sides of the coin are important. Look ahead, yes…but also look behind. It’s not living in the past, it’s remembering where we’ve come from and how it’s shaped us.

So as we set off into this near month and new year, swivel your head around to look in both directions. Remember the year left behind. Scout out the year ahead. And know that this ending, this beginning, is held not by a Roman god, but in the hand of the God of the universe, who can look out over all of eternity in a single glance.

Word Nerds Merch!

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!