Silly Bloody Humans
In the Yoga Sutras, Patanjali warns against vikalpah, or ‘verbal delusion’, which he defines as the arising of images in the mind upon hearing mere words ‘without any reality’ at their basis. In this post, I want to tease out some meanings that have long been lost to the mists of time, touching on some of the wealth and poverty of human experience in the process.
One of the things I’ve most enjoyed about moving to Switzerland has been making connections across languages. Words, like people, have chequered pasts, and it’s fascinating to unearth what’s long since been buried. Sitting here writing on a dreary December evening, watching the clouds sorrowfully emptying their bellies onto a grim-looking Zürich, I had a sudden flashback to my undergraduate days, surrounded by piles of books on Old English in the Bodleian Library. But when you go digging into the past, you never know what you might find; after all, not everything that’s been lost is treasure…
I was barely 18, and had just finished my A-Levels, one of which had been in German Language. What I found especially fascinating as I pored through pages of the earliest recorded form of English (well over a thousand years old, in fact), was how closely connected it was with German. The Anglo-Saxons who spoke Old English were in a sense the kinsmen of the Teutonic tribes, reflected in the very name the English chose to give to them: ‘Germans’, literally meaning ‘of the same parts, brothers, neighbours’, from the Latin word germanus. Even to this day, without necessarily being aware of it, the English word for German people preserves this close bond of language.
But common language also reveals common roots, which in the case of the Anglo-Saxons was a rather bloodthirsty past. The shared concern with survival in feudal times is reflected in the words we more or less continue to share with German today, be those the sword / Schwert, the shield / Schild, or the bow / Bogen. Similarly, on the survival- as opposed to the killing-side, we have water / Wasser, bread / Brot, and houses / Häuser. Our common ancestors had the same things on the tips of their tongues, at the fronts of their minds, and in the palms of their hands. Speech, thought, and blood united us.
Interestingly, the changing meanings of some words trace fairly profound cultural shifts over time. For example, over the last thousand years, growing levels of physical security have meant we no longer have to sheath das Schwert, sling das Schild and shoulder den Bogen before stealthily creeping down to Coop or M&S for some Beyond Burgers. Mirroring this shift in our physical environment, I’m now able to describe the weather as ‘dreary’, meaning a little damp, grey and miserable. But an Anglo-Saxon Huscarl from my hometown in Hastings would have batted an eyelid at the phrase, and for good reason.
To him, dreorig would have meant ‘blood-spattered’ or ‘cruel’, from the root word dreor, which literally meant ‘gore’ or ‘blood’. A related word, droren, meaning to ‘fall, decline, fail’, was used of both rain and the slain in battle. What a totally different universe to inhabit, one in which sprays of bright blood were as commonplace as rain showers. What’s more, there’s a link between the Old English word dreorig and the Middle High German troric, which meant ‘bloody’, rather fascinatingly leading to the modern German word traurig (‘sad’ or ‘sorrowful’, as most Swiss readers will already know). So, two only loosely similar sounding words, the English ‘dreary’ and the German ‘traurig’, in fact share a rather blood-soaked history. One wonders how many days have been called dreary compared to the number of skeletal warriors upon whose graves the rain was falling…
But it isn’t all doom and gloom in the past, or dreary in the present. I want to unearth one more silly fragment of history for your amusement, which shows the past wasn’t all blood, bones, and misery. And that fragment is the word ‘silly’ itself. Again, the German connection is vital to understanding the twists and turns of meaning over time, since it is through the sound of the modern word Seele (‘soul’) that we can hear echoes of the past.
On a lighter note, the modern English ‘silly’ reaches back through the Middle English seli or seely to the Old English gesaelig, meaning ‘happy, fortuitous, prosperous’. (And yes, for those that are wondering, Old English did have reassuringly German-style past participles and adjectives with ge- at the beginning!) Hidden in plain sight, in modern German we find selig, meaning ‘blessed, happy, blissful’, in essence ‘soulful’, which derives from the Old High German salig, just a smidgeon of difference to the Old English gesaelig.
More than anything, silly’s silent glissade in meaning from ‘blessedness’ to ‘idiocy’ in our current usage reveals something deeply symptomatic about modern society. Simply put, the history of this word shows us that our culture deems matters of the soul as plain stupidity. Yet in a world where we increasingly have everything we could possibly wish for at our fingertips, beneath our feet, around our shoulders, and even in our mouths, bellies, and veins, we somehow manage to be chronically unsatisfied. Granted, we may not have to worry about being shot through the throat, or see quite so many fountains of blood from the jugular as we once used to, but as humans, we are rather less ‘silly’ than we used to be. And more’s the pity.
Today, it’s the frown and the heavy heart that we carry around instead of armour, but the irony is that these do little to protect us from dreariness, or Traurigkeit. We seem to have thrown the baby out with the bathwater over the past millennium, getting rid of our blessed silliness along with life’s bloody dreariness. Even the casual English usage of the word ‘bloody’ for ‘annoying’ reflects this ancient connection between battle and monotony. But now that we’re out of the constant warzone that was feudal society, perhaps we owe it to ourselves not to be quite so dreary all the time.
As one of my teachers once told me – with that characteristic twinkle in his eye – yoga is a seriously playful business, and playfully serious. So as the cold sets in this winter, here’s to some serious silliness to warm the soul.