Words of the Month - Let There Be Light

         Last night lying in bed I had a little idea for a short story that involves ley lines (working title “Murder on the Leyline Express”), and this morning as I started jotting down notes I got curious about the etymology of the word ley.  Not entirely surprisingly, it was made up by Alfred Watkins in 1922 when he made up the entire concept of ley lines.  However, Watkins apparently came up with the word by varying from the word lea, so what’s the etymology of that?

        lea - “open field or meadow” goes all the way back to Old English, and variants of it show up in lots of names (Lee, Leigh, and even the loo in Waterloo).  But if we look back even farther, lea comes ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European root *leuk-.

        Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is essentially English’s great-great-great-great…-grandparent language, and you can get a very quick refresher about it here (or here).  The word that linguists refer to as *leuk-, (because that’s all the information they’ve reconstructed about it based on its various descendent languages), meant “light, brightness,” which then came to apply to a whole host of words not only for literal light, but also for metaphorical concepts like “understanding” and related concepts like “clearing, open area, meadow” as in lea.  English, in its charmingly acquisitive way, has collected a number of words that derive from the PIE root *leuk-.  There are so many of them partly because we’ve gained them by way of a number of different languages that descended from PIE, and partly because different forms of the word in PIE (such as verb forms versus noun forms, or forms with different suffixes) gave rise to different words in PIE’s grandchildren.  Let’s take a look!

From Latin some examples are lucid, translucent, Lucifer, and illustrate

          luminous, luminary, and illuminate

          lunar, lunatic, and lunette

          luster

From Old English we get light itself - but only in the sense of “brightness.”  Light meaning “not heavy” actually comes from a completely different PIE root.

          lightning and of course all sorts of other related words with light in them

          lea, plus Leigh and ley that started this off

From Greek (probably) we get link, a now-archaic word for a torch, which you can see in my prior post on Past Professions.  (Links of a chain are unrelated.)

        I’ve chosen a couple of relief block prints to go along with the theme, and the first is a cartoonish piece made as an advertisement.  However, the artist shares the name of the electric company being advertised, and I’m assuming it’s a family business, although I don’t know the actual connection.    There’s something fun about this handmade linocut ad so different from today’s slick commercial pieces.

        The second piece, however, is far more than a bit of fun.  I find the light in this piece absolutely sublime.  The stairs and decorative bannister are suggested with just the slightest threads of light, leaving the leaded glass window to get all the attention.  And yet instead of being centered, the intricate panels become even more dramatic, drawing your eye in and up.

        I’m looking forward to playing around with my story idea and its ley lines, but in real life it’s worth looking for the lines of light that might actually illuminate us.

[Pictures: Marshall Electric Company ad, linocut by Charles Leroy Marshall Sr, ca. 1933 (Image from Kansas State Beach Museum);

The Staircase Window, linocut by Ethel Spowers (1890-1947), (Image from Art Gallery New South Wales).]