Hark!

"The thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."  So said Longfellow, and he was probably right.  I suspect more right in his own nineteenth century than he would be today, when the thoughts of youth often last only until the next in-coming text message. 

Be that as it may, I'm not a youth and my thoughts aren't always long. 

And certainly not deep.  In my last post, I unthinkingly used the exclamation, "But hark!"  One of my more inquisitive readers asked me if, in our childhood, we had not made it a practice of crying "hark!" to each other.  Not bloody likely, I thought to myself, but phrased my reply more diplomatically.

But then I started thinking about it.  And have you ever noticed?  That a word you take for granted suddenly seems bizarre, both in its sound and its written appearance, once you begin thinking about it?  Of course you have -- everyone's noticed that.  But "hark" suddenly seemed surrounded by an dazzling aura of weirdness.  Is it even a real word, I asked myself?

Well, certainly the herald angels thought so.  They sang "Hark!" at a critical moment theologically.  And certain dogs may have thought so, depending on the reading you give to "Hark, hark, the dogs do bark / The beggars are coming to town."  Actually, on reflection, I think it's the rhyme's narrator who is doing the harking, not the dogs.

My on-line dictionary gives "hark" the meaning of "listen attentively, hearken."   And, as you might suspect, "hearken" is merely another form of "hark."  They both date back to about 1175-1225:

From Middle English herken, herkien, from Old English *hercian, *heorcian, *hiercian, ultimately from Proto-Germanic *hauzijaną (“to hear”) + formative/intensive -k (see also the related hīeran, whence English hear). Equivalent to hear +‎ -k. Cognate with Scots herk (“to hark”), North Frisian harke (“to hark”), West Frisian harkje (“to listen”), obsolete Dutch horken (“to hark, listen to”), Middle Low German horken (“to hark”), German horchen (“to hark, harken to”).

Ah, to have lived when men spoke such words!   

Now, should you be a fox hunter, you know that "hark!" is a cry you give to your baffled hounds, commanding them to retrace their steps to pick up the fox's scent again.  From which we say in general "hark back," meaning to retrace our steps.  Or, even more generally, as one dictionary puts it, to evoke or pine for a past era.  

The similar word "hearken" is used in a similar fashion, to hearken back.  Purists insist that one may say either "hearken back" or "hark back" -- but not the scrambled form "harken back," a bastardization that dates back -- like so many deplorable aspects of life -- only to the 1980s.

So, we know that "hark" is an English word of long standing, one still used in polite circles.  But we can't claim that the herald angels literally sang "hark!"   Any more than that they sang "horchen!" or "harkje!"  If they wanted the shepherds tending their flocks to understand them, they probably sang something like "!הארק"

It's been a slow Sunday here in the Northwest Corner.