|
 This
week, one of us was reading a crime novel in which a burglar said a
prayer to St. Dismas before breaking into an apartment. This had us
scratching our heads for a while but a brief consultation of the
Catholic Encyclopedia revealed that Dismas is the name which the
apocryphal “Gospel of Nicodemus” gives to the “good thief” who was
crucified alongside Christ. (The “bad” thief was called Gestas.)
Accordingly, St. Dismas became the patron saint of criminals,
particularly of thieves. His name is thought to derive from dysme,
the Greek for “sunset” and, metaphorically, “death”.
Curiously, the city of San Dimas
(of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure fame) in southern California
takes its name from this saint. A 19th century landowner kept losing
cattle to rustlers and named the area San Dismas in the hope that
this might cause the cattle-thieves to repent. Over time, this pious
intention was forgotten and the name became corrupted to San Dimas.
We wondered if Dismas might be related to dismal but it
turns out that dismal comes from the
Latin dies mali meaning “evil days” or “unlucky days”. Sometimes
inauspicious days are called black-letter days in an allusion to
red-letter days. Medieval scribes would use a red pigment made
from lead oxide (“red lead” or Pb3O4) to mark
saints’ days; all other days were written in black so the term
black-letter day is not very accurate as not all non-saint-days were
bad. Since about 1600 black-letter has also been used for a type
of script, also known as “Old English” or “Gothic” which, apart from
occasional use in newspaper titles, has fallen from favor in
English-speaking countries but is still seen in Germany.
There were three dies mali in the Roman calendar and by a strange
coincidence two of these are our birthdays. Mike’s grandmother would
always insist that we only ever have one birthday and that the yearly
celebration of this date should be called one’s “anniversary”. (Any
wonder Mike is such a pedant?) Granny never did convince many people of
this - which is hardly surprising since birthday has been used to
mean “the annual observance of one’s birth-date” since before the Norman
Conquest. The origin of birthday is pretty obvious but
anniversary is less so. It comes from the Latin annus
(“year”) + versus (“turning”); in other words, it is that which
returns every year.
Calendar itself derives from the Latin calendarium, “an
account book”, and ultimately from calends, the name of the first
day of Roman months. Monthly accounts were due on the calends and the
word comes from the Greek kalein “to call” (i.e. it was when
debts were “called in”). The Greeks themselves had no calends in their
calendar, however. Thus, while the Spanish might procrastinate
(from Latin pro- “until” + cras- “tomorrow”) until
mañana (Sp. “morning” or “tomorrow”) and the Arabs until bukra
fil mish-mish (“tomorrow, in the season of the apricots”), ancient
Romans used the expression ad Graecas calendas (“on the Greek
calends”), a humorous way of saying “never”.
While researching this column we came across a couple of words which
have (undeservedly, we think) fallen into disuse. They are
ereyesterday, meaning “the day before yesterday” and overmorrow,
meaning “the day after tomorrow”. We don’t know about you but to us
overmorrow has a distinctly hobbitty sound to it… “It will be my
eleventy-first birthday on the overmorrow, young Frodo.”
Oh well, it’s time for us to call it a day: it's a day. |
Issue 206, page 1