One Man Went To Mow, Went To Mow A Meadow

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”.

There is also glade.  This one is a bit of a puzzle.  It dates from the first half of the 16th century and since then has meant “a clear open space or passage in a wood or forest, whether natural or produced by the cutting down of trees”.  This suggests sunny spots within the dark (shaded) forest.  If that is the ultimate meaning of the word, then it very likely comes from the same root that produced glad and gleam.  That root is ghel- “to shine”.  Other words from this root are gold, glint, glisten and glass.  The only problem is that there is the form glode, which means basically the same as glade.  Apparently, the laws of word formation in English do not support glode coming from ghel-.  Some have suggested that glode is simply a northern English form of glade but uncertainty persists.  Curiously, in the 17th century, glade began to take on the contradictory meaning of “shade”. There are then words for stands of trees.  One is copse, which is what etymologists call a “syncopated” version of coppice.  These words mean “a small wood or thicket consisting of underwood and small trees grown for the purpose of periodical cutting.”  The connection of “cutting” turns up in the words’ etymology: they come via Old French from Latin colpare “to cut with a blow”, ultimately from Latin colaphus “blow, cuff”.  In the U.S. the word coppice isn’t heard very much; it’s more common in the U.K., where it is also used as a verb.  Coppice turns up in the written record in 1538, 40 years before copse.

Grove is an older word for a stand of trees.  There is no sense of “cutting” in this word.  Instead, it is noted that groves were often planted by early peoples as places to honour their gods.  It dates from the 9th century in English.  Strangely, there are no known cognates in any other Germanic languages.  The best etymologists can do is take it back to a hypothetical root graibo-, which also gave us greave, a word of similar meaning.  Greave dates from about 1000.  The surnames Greave, Greaves, Grove, and Grover are topographical surnames referring to one who originally lived in or near a grove or a greave. The obvious leap from here, you might think, would be to the word (noun) grave (meaning “excavation in earth for reception of a dead body”), but this has an entirely separate etymology which we will likely cover in a later “death-related” English Corner – something to look forward to!