Chapter 1

Getting up

The alarm sounds and rouses you from a deep sleep. While we may consider the electronic buzzing of an alarm clock to be a pretty grim start to the day, the original use of alarm signalled a significantly more stressful situation. The word originates in the Italian all’arme ‘to arms’—a distress call issued to alert an army to an oncoming attack. The word alert has a similar military origin, deriving from the Italian phrase all’erta ‘on the watchtower’. Drawing back the curtains and looking out the window reveals that a new day has dawned. The word dawn is first recorded in the sixteenth century; before that the terms used were dawning or dawing. All three derive from the verb to daw (from Old English dagian), meaning ‘to become day’. If this seems a rather unimaginative way to describe Homer’s rosy-fingered or bright-throned dawn, don’t blame the Anglo-Saxons, since they had a selection of more poetic alternatives.

The Dawn

The Anglo-Saxons were evidently early risers, since they coined a variety of words to describe first light. They even had a word for the hour before dawn—uhtan—that the rest of us would call the middle of the night. This was the hour when medieval monks celebrated the office of uht-song, now known by its Latin name Matins (still seen in the French for morning, matin). Old English also had a term for the sorrow and anxiety experienced at this time of the day, uhtceare, presumably coined by sleepy monks faced with the prospect of getting out of bed in a freezing cold dormitory (Latin dormitorium ‘sleeping place’) for uht-song. Another useful word for capturing that nebulous (Latin nebulosus ‘cloudy’) sense of foreboding that hangs over you first thing in the morning is matutolypea, a classical word literally meaning ‘grief of the dawn’.

Other Anglo-Saxon words for dawn are compounds—a common way of forming new words in Old English (and all Germanic languages). Day-rim, literally ‘border of the day’, refers to dawn as the beginning of a new day. Day-row, whose second element means ‘ray’, figures the dawn as the bringer of light; this image lies behind other terms such as rodor-lihtung ‘illumination of the heavens’ and day-red—describing the colour of the sky. The later Middle Ages added some nicely uplifting words, such as springing and uprising. The fifteenth century also saw the adoption into English of the name of Aurora, the Roman goddess of the dawn, as well as the word orient. Orient is used today to refer to the countries of the East; the word originates in Latin oriri ‘to rise’, and so referred to the East as the land of the rising sun. The occident, the equivalent term for the West, has its origins in the Latin occidere ‘to go down’—land of the setting sun. The image of the rising sun as an opening eye lies behind the sixteenth-century terms peeping and peep of the day. A more dramatic image in which the sun breaks through—which survives in modern English daybreak and crack of dawn—is found in breach of the day, sun-break, prick of the day, and creek (from a Dutch verb meaning ‘burst through’). By contrast with these poetic terms and the images they conjure up, the nineteenth-century dialect sparrow-farts—‘Tha mun be up by sparrowfarts or tha’ll be too late’—seems rather crude.

Having established that there is no excuse to linger in bed any longer, it is time to consult the calendar (from Latin Kalendae, the term for the first day of the Roman month), before throwing back the covers and preparing for the day ahead.

The Days of the Week

The names we give to the days of the week go back to Old English, and were formed by simply translating the Latin equivalents. The Romans labelled the days of the week after the planets, which in turn were named after the Roman gods and goddesses. In most cases, the Roman names have continued in use in the modern Romance languages (languages derived from Latin, the language of Rome); compare, for instance, Latin dies Lunae, dies Martis, dies Mercurii, dies Jovis, dies Veneris with French lundi, mardi, mercredi, jeudi, and vendredi. In rendering these into English, the Anglo-Saxons replaced the Roman deities with equivalents from the Germanic pantheon (Greek pan ‘all’ and theos ‘god’). So in Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday we see the replacement of the Roman gods Mars, Mercury, Jove, Venus, with the Germanic gods Tiw, Woden (the Anglo-Saxon equivalent of the Norse god Odin), Thunor (the Anglo-Saxon version of Norse Thor), and Frig (Odin’s wife). The Roman days named after the sun and the moon, dies Solis and dies Lunae, were also translated into Old English, giving us Sunday and Monday. A similar pattern of replacements can be seen in other Germanic languages, such as German; compare German Montag ‘Monday’, Donnerstag ‘Thursday’ (literally ‘Thunder Day’), and Freitag ‘Friday’. Dienstag ‘Tuesday’ appears to show the replacement of the Roman god Mars with an alternative Germanic deity; the same origin lies behind Dutch Dinsdag. An alternative theory suggests that the first element is a term for a public assembly or council. But instead of naming Wednesday after the Germanic god Woden, modern German has adopted the more prosaic alternative Mittwoch ‘mid-week’. This may originate in a translation of the Latin name media hebdomas ‘middle of the week’, used after the spread of Christianity throughout the Roman empire in preference to a term referring to a pagan deity.

Saturday is the odd one out, since here the Roman deity was preserved in English; thus Latin dies Saturni (day of Saturn) became Old English Sæternesdæg. But where English preserves the Latin name, the modern Romance languages have departed from that source: compare French samedi, Italian sabato, Spanish sábado. These names are instead taken from an alternative Latin term, dies Sabbati ‘day of the Sabbath’, which was adopted with the spread of the Christian religion. This Latin form was also taken up in German, hence modern German Samstag, whose first element originates in the Latin sabbata. An alternative German name, Sonnabend ‘Sunday Eve’, was formed using the Christian concept of the vigil—the eve of a holy day—as an occasion for religious observance (from Latin vigil ‘awake, alert’—the origin of vigilant). Old English had an equivalent in Sunnanæfen, although this has not survived into modern English. Where English has preserved the earlier Roman name for Sunday, dies solis, the modern Romance languages derive their names from the later dies Dominica ‘our Lord’s day’: French dimanche, Italian domenica, and Spanish domingo.