One of the things I love about writing Lingwistics is that I never know where my research - and I use that word lightly - might take me.
So the other day I’m writing a post about some other word whose origins are only known as far back as Latin. After that, I began writing, “things get murky”.
Murky? Where does that more interesting word than the one I’m writing about come from, I thought.
And that was the end of that post.
Murky is one of those inscrutable words whose construction gives few clues about its origins, kind of like the Monolith early in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but smaller. In this it differs from words like television, pneumothorax, antidisestablishmentarianism and countless others which can be interrogated syllable by syllable in order to reveal not only their likely origins but also some sense, however vague, of their possible meaning.
To my mind, murky belongs in a class of words that includes faze, as, big, cow, hello and the. Good luck successfully interrogating any of those syllable by syllable, Columbo.
Murky entered English in the mid-14th century from murk, a noun meaning gloom or darkness, which itself had entered English about 100 years earlier. Before murky was invented, murk doubled as both a noun and an adjective. The addition of the -y was a natural, obvious and perhaps inevitable step. Pick a noun; any one will do. Bang the letter y on the end of it. Voila! You have just made an adjective! Maybe not a good or useful one, but an adjective nonetheless.
That said, it took another three centuries or so before murky become common usage.
You may also be wondering when the old noun mirk became the modern noun murkiness. I’d love to have a simple answer to that question, but I don’t. I can tell you that as well as mirk, Middle English also had mirknes, which had multiple spellings and meant the same thing. So perhaps mirknes eventually settled down as murkiness and bullied mirk off the park. But I don’t know.
Before Middle English, Old English had mirce, which had made its way across the Channel from Old Norse, which got it from Proto-Germanic. It’s related to the modern Danish word mǿrk (“darkness”, which that northern country knows a thing or two about) and Old Saxon mirki. Lithuanian has merkti for the act of shutting the eyes or blinking (it can also mean “soak”, illustrating that English is not the only language that confuses learners by ascribing more than one meaning to some words).
If you keep following the trail back in time, eventually you wind up at the PIE mer, “to flicker, blink or twinkle” - presumably in the manner of a weak and uncertain light. It’s also where English gets morning from and Dutch got the obsolete morgen, an old measure of land equating to roughly two acres, believed to be the amount of land one man could plough in a morning.
(On that note, while my curiosity about animals doesn’t generally extend beyond how tasty they might be flame grilled with a little mustard, it’s interesting that when we rope animals into the task, we still think of it as us who are ploughing the land, not the hard-working beast doing the actual pulling.)
A non-AI generated photo of horses ploughing, humans walking behind. I rest my case. Photo by Miika Laaksonen on Unsplash
Now that we’ve tackled murky’s etymology, let me share with you what I’ve really been busting to. On Monday April 8, 1652, a total solar eclipse passed over part of Scotland. So unexpected and dramatic was the event, that the day was immediately dubbed Mirk Monday (or Mounday, depending on what school you went to), a name that lives on to this day. The Reverend Law of Easter Kilpatrick later wrote that those who experienced it stopped in their tracks, believing the Day of Judgement had arrived.
To those who survived the recent solar eclipse in the US, such nonsense will no doubt be depressingly familiar. In the weeks leading up to that event, theories spewed forth from social media about an impending new world order (supported by martial law where the mirk was scheduled), as well as satanic rituals, Masonic rituals, missile strikes on the moon, and god knows what else. All triggered by three solar objects lining up for a few minutes to create a small shadow on one of them, an event that’s occurred millions of times in Earth’s history. At least people in 1652 had a legitimate excuse for their ignorance (ie, they really were ignorant). Imagine strolling along behind the beasts ploughing your field of a Monday morning in brilliant sunshine when, out of nowhere, the sun begins to disappear before things go completely dark and you can’t see a damn thing and you have no idea why it’s happening. I don’t know about you, but if I’d been one of those people, I reckon I’d have had quite a laundry bill to deal with once things returned to normal.
According to the OED, mirk became obsolete in most of English in the late 1700s, but it’s still used in Scottish English. You can hear it being spoken here.
Bits and specious
The actual date and even day of the week of Mirk Monday is disputed. It may have actually been a Thursday. As for the date, it may have been March 29. The confusion is caused by the switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, which saw writers use dual dating for many years in much the same way countries use both Fahrenheit and Celsius to accommodate everyone. The switch began in 1582 and, amazingly, wasn’t completed by all European countries until 1923.
A total solar eclipse occurs somewhere on Earth every 18 months or so on average. However, if you’ve recently experienced one where you live, you’ll have to wait about 375 years (on average) for the next one to pass your way.
That’s just on average. LA won’t see one for another 1566 years. Halifax, Nova Scotia, on the other hand, has a mere 109-year wait.
The Arctic Circle, which I was disappointed to find Denmark does not sit inside of, is usually thought of as the southern boundary of the polar region where the sun never rises on the shortest day and never sets on the longest day. Its position is not fixed but moves as the Earth’s axial tilt moves - by as much as two degrees every 41,000 years.
The Arctic region is distinct from the Arctic Circle, and is often defined as “that area where the average temperature for the warmest month is below 10 degrees Celsius”. Its boundary (which must surely be shrinking) is anything but circular, but more like the squiggle of a two-year-old who’s just discovered caffeine. It’s the red line in the image below.
Quote of the week
OK, so what’s the speed of dark?
Steven Wright
Dual calendars seem tricky today, but the almanacs of that time handled it easily, and also handled the dual New Year, which was Jan 1 for some purposes and Mar 25 for others.
Here's a 1750 almanac that shows how it was done.
https://books.google.com/books?id=tUYsAAAAMAAJ
As a Dutch speaker, I had to look up "morgen", but you are absolutely right.: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagwand
"Morgen" is also our perfectly normal word for morning, as in "goedemorgen!", and it also means "tomorrow", which causes less confusion than you might think.