Words: Merry

PEOPLE parting for the Christmas break wish each other a Happy Christmas, but on the day itself they say 'Merry Christmas'. I wished someone a Merry Christmas last week and was reminded that it was premature. This distinction is hard to explain. It is easier to understand why Christmas is called merry but New Year is happy, because 'happy' first meant 'lucky', like the Latin 'felix'.

I wonder how many people share my feeling that 'merry' is a rather prissy word. I associate it with honest upstanding lads in old children's stories whose laugh, if I remember right, was usually merry. Black Beauty's skittish pony friend in Anna Sewell's novel was called Merrylegs, which I thought was twee when I first read it as a boy and I still think so.

Miss Sewell would not have chosen that name if she had known that in less refined circles than hers a 'merrylegs' would come to mean a prostitute; but that is by the way. 'Merry' was a good word in its time, though quite a low-key one. In Shakespeare, most often, it does indeed mean simply 'happy'. When Petruchio is teasing Kate in the Shrew he says 'Be merry, Kate', or, as we would say now, 'Cheer up'. Jessica in the Merchant says she is never merry - cheerful, she means - when listening to music.

But the word had its down side even then. 'You are merry, my lord,' says Ophelia to Hamlet. She means he is being offensively facetious, which he is. Boswell records Johnson's annoyance at some clergymen who, says Boswell, 'thought they should appear to advantage by assuming the lax jollity of men of the world'. Johnson whispered to his friend Beauclerk: 'This merriment of parsons is mighty offensive.' Johnson was pleasantly expert with words.

I am not sure when 'merry' first acquired its purely festive tone. It was already being used as a euphemism for 'drunk' by the 16th century. Now, of course, it is a bit of an archaism and therefore, like snow-flecked stage-coaches, part of the yuletide tradition.