This is my fourth year of the A to Z Challenge and I am frantically trying to get posts written ahead of time – as I have promised myself each year apart from 2020 when I only discovered the Challenge on the first day and so had to pants it all the way through. Still, that was the year of lockdown and so there was a certain amount of time available! So here we are again…
It takes time to forget things – whether as an individual whose head becomes, eventually, too crammed to contain everything at the front of our minds, ready for use, or as a society, a group of individuals. At least with a group, there is less chance of forgetting things because we can utilise our collective memories – if one person is having a senior moment, perhaps another will have the thing, the word, or the phrase, to hand. Nevertheless, things do get forgotten, and language mutates so that the original sound and its meaning are lost – there is a Pub in Leeds, West Yorkshire, called “The Skyrack” and on its swinging picture sign (originally provided for those unable to read), there is a picture of a very large oak tree – something which shines no light on the meaning of “skyrack”. However, across the road is another pub called “The Shire Oak” and this reveals that “skyrack” is an ameliorated version of “Shire Oak” – the very large oak tree which once stood on this spot. Over time, the word has been run together and changed out of recognition.
Another way that the meaning of things gets lost, is because words and phrases get borrowed from one group of people to another, things that have an obvious utility at the time, but later, when the original group are no longer around, become obfuscated. We shall encounter a lot of words and phrases from the days of wooden sailing ships where sailors had many phrases that described their work – work conducted far away from their homelands and whilst the sailor’s object was not to disguise their meanings – why should they – but simply because they needed a large lexicon of their own special work terms. We shall encounter other phrases whose origins have been lost because the originally referred to practice has died out…
On the other hand, many groups of people have chosen or found it necessary to conceal their meanings from others – Cockneys, fairground workers, criminals and those persecuted for their race, class, gender or sexuality. Even children within a family may develop a whole language of their own – for fun or to keep their communications private and themselves safe. If you were in one such family and feel able to – please share in the comments…
And so I will not just be looking for the lost origins of words and phrases whose meanings we know and still use, but reflecting on the type of words, their original purpose and the scheme of the language they “hail” from, and right there is a word describing the way that sailors would call out to passing ships, out on the great expanses of the world’s oceans – where they “hail” from, what is their identity – that is what people most want to know about a passing stranger…
Post Script
I have been participating in a writing group led by Deborah Bayer of “Healers Write, Writers Heal” who is also participating in the A to Z Challenge 2023 and by chance, she shared a poem which is exactly about the modification of words and the development of secret languages in families. In the poem “Besayadoo” by Yalie Saweda Kamara, she describes sitting with her Grandmother, who herself talks in a patois English, and watching two boys, thug-like in appearance, give a tender touch and salutation as they part. Grandmother understands the gestures but cannot understand the word besayadoo, and the poet has to translate it as “Be Safe Dude!” at which the grandmother says that the boys are not the thugs they appear to be. You can read the poem over at The Slowdown – a blog which invites you to do just that, through poetry…