Word of the Moment: Spring

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

-Robert Frost

Spring is Nature's way of saying “Let's Party!” 

-Robin Williams

Centuries of reckoning the beginning of our year as 1 January have done little to dull the sense that spring is the real start of the year.  This is the time for "spring cleaning," for new beginnings and new loves.  It is also a fleeting time, a short youth that quickly gives way to the heat of summer.  Spring may be origin of all things new, but to get to the modern meaning of the word “spring” we will have to go back in time, more than a thousand years.

The word “spring” began life as a verb. This meaning still survives, albeit in a limited sense as in “spring into action.” You can also “spring” someone from jail, and suddenly “spring bad news” on them. Less clear is the slang sense of paying for something, as in “they sprang for dinner.” Although in my experience, this too has to be done fairly quickly to preserve the modesty of those whom you're paying for.

In Old English, the word probably more resembled its cognates in Germanic languages:

GERMAN: springen - jump

SWEDISH: springa - run

AFRIKAANS: spring - leap

This sense of a quick or sudden appearance must have influenced the first noun to be formed from this verb: a “well-spring” where water mysteriously jumps from the ground. Originally only used in compounds, eventually it went solo and henceforth we could talk about “spring water.” In the 1400's or so it beget two more nouns: one which meant the act of jumping or leaping and the other meaning a tightly wound coil of metal that spring about.

As we've seen elsewhere, the urge to play with our words is irresistible. A bounce in your demeanor is a “spring in your step,” and youth is often referred to as the “spring of your life.” The most common definition for “spring” as the season following winter, began from just such a metaphor.

Prior to the late 14^th century, the months between winter and summer were known as “Lent.” Which is now used only in the Catholic ritual calendar to denote the period of 40 days prior to Easter. Despite this church connection, “Lent” does not come from Latin, but from the Old English word “Lencten,” which was a shortening a West Germanic word that meant long days, *langa-tinaz.

Other Germanic went another direction and tend to used words with "fore" or "early" for the season name. Hence, you have the Danish “voraar,” the Dutch “voorjaar” ("fore-year") and the German word “Frühling,” which comes from the Middle High German word for early.

In the fourteenth century, however, “Lent” began to be replaced with less astronomical and perhaps more agricultural term: “springing-time,” when the plants began to suddenly burst from the ground. And anyone who has ever seen tulips leaping from their beds overnight needs no imagination to see the connection. Within a few decades “springing-time” had been shortened to “spring-time” and later transformed into “spring of the year.” It only takes a little bit of lexical laziness to shorten this phrase into the Modern English “Spring.”

This word, already as flexible as a double jointed contortionist on Vicodin, not only refers to a chronological placement of events within the year, but also conveys a sense of suddenness and renewal. In recent months news outlets have characterized the populist uprisings in the Middle East as an “Arab Spring.” This term is a riff on the “Prague Spring”, the half of 1968 when reformist politicians attempted to open up Communist Czechoslovakia to the world.

The Czech novel set during this period, The Unbearable Lightness of Being espouses the philosophical position encapsulated in the German expression “Einmal ist keinmal,” or “once is nothing.” That is, everyone lives only once and the events of that life will never be duplicated again. Which sounds like the perfect definition of Spring-time to me.