Holidays: The Lights in the Winter Darkness

May everyone enjoy all the different festivals of light! (It seems that it is a happy commonality of the long holiday season—even if the dates don’t line up very well—that, near the darkest time of the year, when people most long for light, light is the theme of many different celebrations.)

Now, the conventions of the season having been maintained, on to seasonal business! Ms. Picky has been wracking her brain, trying to find some appropriate grammarian’s nod to the season, and it hasn’t been an easy task. First, since this blog deals with language, it would likely have to be a song. Then, of course, the seasonal nod would have to be generic and all-inclusive, and that’s so limiting, particularly when some imported holiday songs are transliterated, and it doesn’t seem fair to quibble over spelling for phonetic approximations.

There is one song, however—if you live in North America or are a North American expat, and no matter which holiday you celebrate (or even if you celebrate no holiday)—that you cannot escape. The song is heard over and over again at this time of year, but it has long been misunderstood by its listeners. Ignoring the rest of the lyrics, what does the following line really mean?

God rest ye merry gentlemen

Is the lyricist inviting a group of happy revelers to come and sit down in a pub? Hmmm. Well, it would help if the line had some punctuation, wouldn’t it?

All right, choose one:

God rest ye, merry gentlemen.

or

God rest ye merry, gentlemen.

It is the second, of course, that is correct, and the greeting is akin to “Stay well.” “Rest,” in this case, is used with its old meaning—to stay, or to remain. The entire greeting, therefore, is intended to mean “keep your spirits up,” or “Be of good cheer.” That’s a worthy sentiment that stands on its own, regardless of which holiday the song came from.

For RC: Staunch and Stanch

Staunch

The adjective staunch means solidly built, loyal, and dependable.

Example:

In spite of the charges brought against him, he remained the senator’s staunch supporter.

Stanch

The verb stanch means to stop the flow of liquid, particularly blood. Often used metaphorically, to mean “stop the outflow of money.”

Examples:

He put a tourniquet around the hiker’s leg, to stanch the bleeding.

The company wanted to stanch the flow of money to the payout of defined-benefit pensions.

For MM: Past Tenses, British and (sigh) American

Because English originated in England, and the U.S. and Canada are, after all, only former colonial “outposts,” British English seems to be more static and “pure,” while American English continues to evolve into dialect at a rapid rate—often, unfortunately, for the worse. This causes grammarians to draw their battle lines regarding whether to use the original or the degraded versions of some words. In this case, we are talking about the past tenses of two regular* verbs that Americans have, increasingly, been making into irregular verbs: dived and dove and sneaked and snuck.

Correct: She dived off the high-diving board.

Lamentable: He dove into the deep end of the pool.

Correct: She sneaked out of the meeting to take the call from her cell phone.

Tragic: He snuck out of bed for a late-night snack.

Unfortunately, otherwise-quite-respectable journalists, who should be setting the standards for the rest of us, are guilty of using “dove” as the past tense of dive (which hardly even makes Ms. Picky wince anymore) and “snuck” as the past tense of sneak (which makes Ms. Picky roll her eyes in despair).

Please, be a staunch supporter of “dived” and “sneaked,” and stanch the tide of bad grammar!

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*Regular verbs are those that form their past tense by adding d or ed to the present-tense form, e.g., jump/jumped and breathe/breathed. Irregular verbs are those that change their form completely from the present to the past, e.g., run/ran and write/wrote.