citizenjournal

Sorry to disappoint you but the title might suggest that we were going to reveal the long lost origin of the nursery rhyme, but sadly this will remain lost in the mists of time; however, we are going to examine the word meadow, and it’s origin, as it leads on to a series of interesting connections to ancient and modern words and practices. Meadow, mead (a grassy field), mow, and the math in aftermath are all related, coming from the same Indo-European root, me-, “to cut down grass with a sickle or scythe”.  So a meadow is a place where grass was cut for hay.  Today we may think of meadows as natural places where wildflowers and animals abound, but in the Old World, many meadows were probably mown by man for thousands of years.  The word is very old and dates from at least the 10th century (as do the other words mentioned above) in English, and there are cognates (see below) in several other Germanic languages. A cognate is a word in one language that has the same origin as a word in another language, resulting in similar spellings, pronunciations, and meanings. Regarding aftermath, today it means the “state or condition left by a (usually unpleasant) event”, but it was originally “a second mowing of grass” or “the crop of grass which springs up after the mowing in early summer”.  It is not clear why cut grass came to be equated with an unpleasant event – but, regardless, math simply means “a mowing”.

Dinner is, for most English speakers, the main meal of the day. When the word was first used (in the 12^th century) it referred to a midday meal, but it did not remain so for long. By the early 16^th century it had become the first meal of the day, what we would call breakfast. No doubt those 16^th century diners had their own reasons for this but it makes perfect sense etymologically as the verb to dine comes from the Late Latin disjejunare, “to breakfast” via the Old French disner. The Latin word disjejunare, incidentally, is quite literally “break fast”, being dis (“undo”) + jejunare (“to fast”) and also gave the French word déjeuner “breakfast”*. Obviously, dinner could not get any earlier than breakfast and after the 16^th century it drifted through the day, being served later and later until, during the Victorian era, high society sat down to dinner at 10 p.m. Having one’s main meal of the day at such a late hour meant that many tummies were growling by late afternoon. To avoid that unpleasant hollow feeling, a new meal was invented. It was just a light snack, basically a few cakes and pastries served with the expensive new status symbol, tea. Consequently, the meal was called “tea”.