Wednesday January 4, 2006
Spanking brand new year
By HASMITA CHANDER
There is something about newness that excites us, makes us feel hopeful of better things to come.
Now that the new year is with us, it’s time to plan what we will do – draw out a set of goals, make resolutions: to work harder, to spend more time with family, to earn more, to be more patient, to give up smoking, to lose 10 kilos.
We hope that whatever we start anew will be good this time around, or at least nicer than before. When we have a new baby at home, we want to make sure that this child gets the best opportunities.
Babies give us a phrase connected to newness. A car is proudly shown off as spanking new – from the old tradition of doctors or midwives gently slapping the bottoms of new-born babies that don’t cry on their own, to start them breathing.
The word “new” is thought to be derived from several possible languages – Old English niwe, Old High German niuwi, Latin novus, or Greek neos.
These roots, especially Latin, gave rise to many other words as well: “novel” and “novelty” (related to newness), “novice”, the French “nouveau” that came into English with “nouveau riche” (new rich) and “art nouveau” (new art).
“Novice” used to mean a probationer in a religious order and at a different time or usage, the inexperience of a person, connected to slaves, but the current meaning has been around since the early 1400s.
With “new” came new thoughts. “Newfangled” meaning “recently come into fashion” finds its roots in new + fangel, where “fangel” came from Old English fon, “to capture”.
We have “New Age” that the Merriam Webster dictionary defines as: “of, relating to, or being a late 20th century social movement drawing on ancient concepts especially from Eastern and American Indian traditions and incorporating such themes as holism, concern for nature, spirituality, and metaphysics”.
The “brand” of “brand-new” meant a piece of burning wood, then it came to mean the mark made by a hot iron – used on cattle and slaves – so that brand-new was “fresh from the fire”.
And then there are the “re-” words of newness: “rebirth”, “renew”, “rekindle”.
“Revive” is from re- + vive (live, from vivere (to live) in Latin). “Renaissance”, re- + naissance (birth in French), was the great period of the revival of classical-based art and learning in Europe. Now renaissance is used to mean “a revival” in general.
A clean slate is a new start; the phrase comes from the classroom where students wrote with chalk on slates. By wiping a slate clean, a student could remove any evidence of his mistakes; today we use this to say that we forgive old wrongs.
Let’s wipe our slates clean, then, and drink a toast to the spanking new year – here’s to 2006!
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