merry == brief?
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From Middle English mery, merie, mirie, myrie, murie, murȝe, from Old English meriġe, miriġe, myriġe, myreġe, myrġe (“pleasing, agreeable; pleasant, sweet, delightful; melodious”), from Proto-West Germanic *murgī (“short, slow, leisurely”), from Proto-Germanic *murguz (“short, slow”), from Proto-Indo-European *mréǵʰus (“short”). Cognate with Scots mery, mirry (“merry”), Middle Dutch mergelijc (“pleasant, agreeable, joyful”), Norwegian dialectal myrjel (“small object, figurine”), Latin brevis (“short, small, narrow, shallow”), Ancient Greek βραχύς (brakhús, “short”). Doublet of brief.
The shift from "slow, leisurely" to "agreeable" is an easy one. And likewise the shift from the cause of happiness to the state of happiness — from the OED's sense I.1.a "Of an occupation, event, state, or condition: causing pleasure or happiness; pleasing, delightful" to sense II.4.1 "Full of animated enjoyment (in early use chiefly with reference to feasting or sporting); full of laughter or cheerfulness; joyous".
But the earlier shift from "short" to "slow" is less intuitive: short→long does match slow→fast, but matching brief with slow, not so much. There's a diminutive in the song "(Have Yourself) A Merry Little Christmas", but "Have yourself a brief little Christmas"? I don't think so.
So have a merry Christmas, of the calendrically designated duration!
N.B. According to genius.com,
“Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” is a song written in 1943 by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane and introduced by Judy Garland in the 1944 MGM musical Meet Me in St. Louis. Frank Sinatra later recorded a version with modified lyrics. In 2007, ASCAP ranked it the third most performed Christmas song during the preceding five years that had been written by ASCAP members. In 2004 it finished at No. 76 in AFI’s 100 Years…100 Songs rankings of the top tunes in American cinema.
The 1944 Judy Garland version is here, and the original verging-on-tragic lyrics are here.
On the sociophonetic rather than lexicosemantic side, there are the (various forms of the) Mary/marry/merry and merry/Murray mergers…
John From Cincinnati said,
December 25, 2025 @ 9:55 am
On the syndicated TV show Jeopardy! that aired December 24 2025, the Final Jeopardy answer in the category Holiday Songs was
Two of the three contestants correctly wrote
YouTube video here
Philip Taylor said,
December 25, 2025 @ 10:06 am
Forgive my obvious stupidity, John, but what exactly did you mean
"Correctly wrote" in answer to what question ?
Rorie Ed said,
December 25, 2025 @ 11:32 am
The clues on Jeopardy are in the form of answers to unexpressed questions. The challenge for contestants is to provide the questions that would result in those answers.
Rorie Ed said,
December 25, 2025 @ 12:06 pm
Philip Taylor: On jeopardy, contestants are provided with an answer and the challenge is to guess the question that the answer answers.
Ed Rorie said,
December 25, 2025 @ 12:08 pm
Philip Taylor: on Jeopardy, contestants are provided with an answer, and the challenge is to guess the question that the answer answers.
Duncan said,
December 25, 2025 @ 12:20 pm
@ Philip Taylor
I suppose you must be in a region where Jeopardy! hasn't played or at least never became popular enough to have become the element of cultural literacy status it has attained here in the US, where it has been playing for well over half a century at this point. (Wikipedia says it originated in 1964! with the modern daily version from 1984.)
The missing cultural literacy bit is that Jeopardy has a well-known twist. From Wikipedia: "Rather than being given questions, contestants are instead given […] clues in the form of answers and they must [phrase] each response in the form of a question."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeopardy!
So stating the (now, supplied the missing cultural literacy) obvious, the participants were given the *answer* "… 'it may be your last' [which Judy Garland refused to sing, in the category of 'Holiday Songs']" and had to come up with the correct *question* to match that answer.
Philip Taylor said,
December 25, 2025 @ 12:30 pm
Ah, thank you both — all is now clear. I confess I am unaware of "Jeopardy", but that is probably because I voluntarily surrendered my television licence many years ago — it may well be shewn in this country, but I would be unaware if it was. But I am familiar with the format, of which the most famous version I know is "Tell me, Dr Presume, what is your middle initial ?". It doesn't exactly fit into what I now believe to be the Jeopardy format, but I think you will nonetheless get the idea …
Bob Ladd said,
December 25, 2025 @ 12:58 pm
Slightly off topic, but whatever the etymology of merry, it's also a little odd that it's the adjective used in the formulaic Christmas greeting instead of happy, which otherwise seems to be the default for holiday greetings (Easter, New Year, Halloween, Thanksgiving, etc.). The Google n-grams for "Merry Christmas" and "Happy Christmas" – be sure to separate them for British and American English! – suggest that the use of merry in this context has been consistently more common, though for much of the 20th century the two adjectives were in fairly even competition in British English. (This has definitely changed in the 40 years I've been in the UK, as the Google n-gram shows.) In American English "Happy Christmas" verges on ungrammatical, but I seem to recall that the last couplet of "The Night Before Christmas" in the book version that I had as a child used happy, not merry.
Rodger C said,
December 25, 2025 @ 1:19 pm
I always assumed that merry derived its English meaning from the stereotype that short people are humorous fellows. I wonder if Tolkien had the same thought.
J.W. Brewer said,
December 25, 2025 @ 1:54 pm
"A short life and a merry one" is (with slight wording variations) a long-established fixed phrase. Whiting's _Early American Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases_ finds it as early as 1697 and then used in 1702 by Cotton Mather.
The google books ngram viewer shows "merriment" in steady-and-fairly-steep decline from around 1840 forwards until it experienced a rather modest rise after bottoming out circa 1980. The data for the noun is not going to be as skewed by the fixed phrase "Merry Christmas," so is maybe a better proxy for the general marginalization of the set of related lexemes in non-Christmas contexts.
AntC said,
December 25, 2025 @ 3:28 pm
@Bob Ladd: 'Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year' is the usual phrase. Using 'Happy' for both would be rather flat.
David Morris said,
December 25, 2025 @ 3:45 pm
The Australian musical comedy group the Doug Anthony All Stars have a song called 'Maria', which uses the words Maria, Māori, Murray, marina, marinara, marigolds and marry prominently (but not merry).
To me, merry has a shorter 'feel' than happy. We don't wish people a happy Christmas and a merry new year.
Chris Button said,
December 26, 2025 @ 7:27 am
I suppose the phrase "short and sweet" takes care of the semantic shift.
As for songs with "Happy Christmas", "Fairytale of New York" by The Pogues comes to mind. But to Bob Ladd's point, the songwriters aren't Americans (despite the New York setting).
J.W. Brewer said,
December 26, 2025 @ 7:37 am
To David Morris' point, outside of Yuletide greetings, "merry" survives in reasonably good shape in the fixed phrase "eat, drink, and be merry," which is consistent with the notion of merriment being a near-term and temporary activity rather than an open-ended and potentially permanent state like happiness (at least aspirationally) could be.
That wording entered our inventory of stock phrases from the traditional translation of Ecclesiastes 8:15, which runs back beyond the King James Version to Coverdale's initial translation of 1535 ("to eate and drynke, and to be mery"). However, it was an innovation then, because Tyndale's Middle English version (circa 1395) had had "to ete, and drynke, and to be ioiful." Despite its status as a fixed phrase, many recent translations have eschewed "be merry" in that verse as an archaism and several have gone with Tyndale's alternative as less archaic-sounding.
FWIW, my own ear doesn't really react to "merry" as inherently archaic, but if you use a concordance to pull up all of its occurrences in the King James Version (about 40) and see how more recent translations handle a sampling of those same verses it seems clear that it is widely perceived as an archaism.
CuConnacht said,
December 26, 2025 @ 8:25 am
@Bob Ladd, I noticed at an abridged and possibly revised performance of A Christmas Carol a week ago that the greeting was always Merry Christmas (sometimes eliciting a Bah! Humbug! response) and never Happy Christmas, which is what I have heard from Brits most of my life. It also seems to me from the BBC that Merry is making inroads in Britain these days, perhaps under North American influence.
Philip Spaelti said,
December 26, 2025 @ 9:00 am
With respect to *murguz (“short, slow”): a shift from "short" to "slow" would certainly strike me as counterintuitive.
But a shift from "short" to "joyful" seems perfectly fine. Compare German "kurzweilig" (from "kurz" short) meaning "fun, enjoyable", presumably from the idea of makes time pass quickly.
J.W. Brewer said,
December 26, 2025 @ 9:03 am
Maybe what's even more curious about the "slow" etymology is that one of the standard current senses of "merry" is indeed the very opposite of that as used to mean (this is merriam-webster.com's sense 3) "quick, brisk," as in (their example) "a merry pace."
Brett Altschul said,
December 26, 2025 @ 2:08 pm
@Chris Button: I don't know whether it's true, but I heard yesterday that "Fairytale of New York" was intended to have Chrissie Hynde singing the lead female vocals. However, she apparently did not show up for the sessions, so the producer, Steve Lillywhite, substituted his wife Kirsty MacColl—which was probably for the better anyway.
Yves Rehbein said,
December 26, 2025 @ 6:15 pm
@ Philip Spaelti, that's what etymonline says. Note also Old Norse skemta "to amuse, entertain, amuse oneself," from skamt, neuter of skammr "short". I do not always use etymonline, though if I do it's because I have no access to OED.
Let me add that kurzweilig contrasts with langweilig ("boring"), where long may defer to an original sense of longing desire.
J.W. Brewer said,
December 26, 2025 @ 9:56 pm
@Brett: I don't know about that, but the song was a work-in-progress for a long time. Long before Ms. MacColl was involved there were at least two separate rough demo versions (with notable differences between them in the lyrics) recorded in the first half of 1986 with Cait O'Riordan singing the female part. But it didn't get finished, and then Cait left the band, and they changed record labels, and they got a new producer (Lillywhite, who could have been a really bad fit but worked out okay), and another year went by before they finished it up and unleashed it on the world.
Not only is the songwriter not himself American, the characters are usually taken to be Irish immigrants in the NYC setting, who plausibly might not have switched over to a more Americanized seasonal greeting than what they had been used to.
RP said,
December 27, 2025 @ 5:57 am
If we are having a digression into the Jeopardy quiz show, can we please note that the conceit "if this is the answer, what is the question?" gives question and answer pairs that are just not anything approaching questions and answers as normally understood?
And … to quote a meme, I'm tired of pretending they are.
The example above: "What is Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas?" would yield an answer like, "It's the title line of a holiday song sung by Judy Garland." If you answered "In an early draft, this …" you'd sound so odd people would wonder what was up.
Yes, sure it's a quiz show gimmick, and just a different way of asking questions. But I have a (very small) bee in my bonnet about it, which caused me to activate typing.
Philip Taylor said,
December 27, 2025 @ 6:08 am
Oh well, if we're still discussing Jeopardy, I should correct my earlier comment : the question sought was not "Tell me, Dr Presume, what is your middle initial ?" but rather "Tell me, Dr Presume, what is your full name ?". The answer is left to the reader …
Seonachan said,
December 27, 2025 @ 12:30 pm
There's also the John & Yoko song “Happy Christmas (War Is Over)”.
Re: merry/marry/Mary, there’s a novelty folk song with the refrain:
Mary Mack’s mother’s making Mary Mack marry me
My mother’s making me marry Mary Mack
I’m gonna marry Mary so that Mary will take care of me
We’ll all be making merry when I marry Mary Mack
The silliness of it has a slightly different flavor for those who have the merger vs. those who don’t.
Yves Rehbein said,
December 27, 2025 @ 4:50 pm
@ RP, question-answer sets do not have to be one-to-one. Any given PIE root, to stick with the theme of this tread, is the answer to a complex set of questions. When its all said and done x' answers to the etymology of x for all x in 4000 recent and a couple extinxt languages. You are rarely interested in all of them and, more importantly, "short" may not be the right answer to define "merry". That's when things get interesting.
Roscoe said,
December 27, 2025 @ 9:18 pm
The first few seasons of "Jeopardy!" (hosted by Art Fleming) did feature clues-as-answers and responses-as-questions in a more conventional sense: a clue might read "5,280," and the correct response would be "What is the number of feet in a mile?". I suspect the format has persisted, even after the show's producers moved toward clues that aren't really "answers" (per RP above), because it fosters a genteel rhythm befitting the show's intellectual trappings: the contestants aren't just firing back responses, but graciously asking the host to rule those responses correct.
Philip Taylor said,
December 28, 2025 @ 11:09 am
Would "What is $2^5 × 3 × 5 × 11$ ?" have also been accepted as correct, Roscoe ?
Olaf Zimmermann said,
December 28, 2025 @ 12:39 pm
I feel a book title coming on:
The Guide to Merriment – Thinking short and slow.
KevinM said,
December 28, 2025 @ 2:24 pm
Re Jeopardy, the object does not seem to be to frame an actual realistic question. The rule is just that your "answer" must be phrased as a question, so preceding it by "What is" will suffice, even if it makes little sense. I never understood it as anything but a cognitive distraction, or a trap. Stating the correct answer but neglecting to phrase it as a question, at least in the later rounds, results in no credit. The analogy would be to forgetting to say "May I" in the children's game "Mother May I." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_may_I%3F
Philip Taylor said,
December 28, 2025 @ 3:42 pm
I wonder what fraction of today’s children (almost universally referred to as "kids" these days, much to my despair) would (a) understand the difference between "can I" and "may I", and (b) consistently use the correct one.
ajay said,
December 29, 2025 @ 6:01 am
I wonder if the shift has something to do with the idea that pleasant experiences seem to be over quickly? If I say "I hope your Christmas dinner seems to last for ever", that is not a pleasant wish.