The English language seems to be full of fossilised words – words which have almost gone out of use but have left one surviving trace in an old phrase or saying. Does anything else have cockles, apart from a heart in the process of being warmed? Where else would we find a figment, except in the imagination? When used in such a way the original meaning of the words can get a little lost. We have to look very closely before we recognise the related words that help us pin down the meaning – in the case of figment we can find a few other words meaning 'made' or 'artificial' such as fiction, feigned, figure and effigy (and artificial itself). Sometimes these links can be hard to spot even when staring us in the face. Until we get our eye in we just don’t spot the word heal hiding inside health, never mind failing to see the links with whole and hale – and as for holy or hello…

Religion seems to attract more than its fair share of these fossilised words. Let's work through the Easter season and see how many we can turn up. We are off to a good start with Shrove Tuesday. Shriving turns out to be what a priest does when he prescribes a penance for someone. 'Prescribing' would actually be the best modern version of the word, since it also derives from the Latin scribere – to write. But it is a surprise to find that short shrift was the few minutes a prisoner about to be executed got to make his confession. Other names for the same day are of course mardi gras ('fat Tuesday') and carnival (carne vale – farewell to meat), both relating to the last feast before the long Lenten fast. I guess all of these meanings were quite obvious when the terms were coined. How long before a future writer has to include an explanation of what a pancake used to be?

Ash Wednesday is obvious enough, but it is the first day of Lent: another one of those words apparently with no other use outside this one context. In fact, it is just an early version of our word 'length'. The origin is the Old English word for the spring: lencten monath in Saxon, or 'lengthening month' in modern English. Lengthening is what the days are doing as we pass through the vernal equinox (noting as we go that primavera is modern Italian for the spring), and we wait for the full moon that tells us that Easter is almost with us at last. At the cerenomy of the washing of the feet, we hear Jesus say, "A new commandment I give unto you…" – and mandatum novum do vobis gets us straight to Mandatum day, the original form of Maundy Thursday. Jesus was of course celebrating Passover, In Hebrew Pesach. Now we see why we light a Paschal candle, but I am left wondering how the French, who use Pâques, manage to distinguish between Easter and Passover.

Good Friday brings us around to some of the most familiar characters in the New Testament, and we get a chance to ponder the meaning of some of their names. Peter plays a big part, and we all know that the name Jesus really gave him was the Hebrew Cephas. For some reason the English Bible always translates this to the Latinate Peter – Latin Petros – so children always have to have Jesus' try at a pun explained to them. I guess 'Saint Rocky' doesn’t quite have the gravitas that we want for the first Pope. In the Stations of the Cross, Veronica wipes the face of Jesus and is left with a true image of His face on her handkerchief. Which is exactly what we might expect to happen to a lady called vera icona. And then there is the mysterious Barabbas. Like all of the other Bar-somethings (Bartimaeus for example) he was somebody's son. But whose? Abba's of course! Pilate was certainly revealing a considerable dedication to his position. Being able to pull off a pun relating one kind of Father’s son to another in Hebrew is getting to know the local culture in a big way!

Barabbas' and Veronica's parents must surely share the prize for prescient child-naming, but I guess Pilate earned his name in life. Pontius Pilatus appears to mean 'Hairy Pontius'. The Hairy One's boss was Tiberius Caesar, named after the 'original' Julius. The fascinating thing about the name Caesar is that the origin usually given for his name turns out to be 180 degrees wrong. We often read that Caesarian sections are named after the way Julius was born, but in fact the boy was named after the operation! The Latin verb 'to cut' is caedere, with its past participle caesus; Julius 'Cut-Out' shares his linguistic origins (and his ultimate end!) with scissors and chisels.

And so we reach Easter itself. Probably everyone knows that 'to crucify' is from the Latin word crux, meaning cross. Golgotha and Calvary both mean 'skull' (in Hebrew and Latin), and 'tomb' comes from the Latin tumba. 'Tomb' is interesting because it actually implies a mound – related words include tumour (a swelling) and tumult (a swelling of sound). Not quite the dug-out cave we always see in the films. Actually the Latin vulgate Bible doesn’t use tumba at all. St. Jerome went for monumentum. A 'monument' doesn’t imply any particular sort of construction – it means more or less the same as memorial.

To understand the word Easter itself we have to look beyond the Bible and the classical world. The spring festival was called easter long before England was evangelised, and I guess the name was so well established that a commonplace word based on the Jewish/Christian Paschal just never managed to displace it. No less a person than the Venerable Bede tells us that the season was named after the Saxon goddess whose feast was celebrated in the spring. Her name is written Eostre or Eastre, and her name just dervies from the word East – the direction of the rising sun. She was indeed the goddess of the dawn, and a fertility symbol. She was also a bit of a shape-shifter, often being seen in season rushing about wildly in her favourite form of a hare. She has survived for us mythically as the Mad March Hare and the Easter Bunny.

Lots of words; lots of meanings. If any of you know any I have missed out, tell me about it in time for next Easter!

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© Bill Merrick 2002. First printed in Walcabout, the magazine of the Worth Abbey Lay Community. Reproduced with permission. The views represented on this page are the views of the individual contributor, not necessarily the official views of the Lay Community of St. Benedict.