06.14.08
Once upon a midnight (fill in the blank)
We get a lot of rain ’round these parts this time of year. Don’t you hate those dreary rainy days? Gray skies, drab sunlight, the clouds spilling blood . . .
Hold on, Mr. Masochistic Meteorologist. Clouds spilling blood? What’s that all about?
It’s about a paraphrase of Edgar Allen Poe:
Once upon a midnight gory,
While I pondered ’bout this story . . .
In Old English, dreor was flowing blood. (As an aside, dreor arises from a root meaning “flow” or “fall”—dreor was a specific type of flow—that of blood.) If something was dreary, it was bloody.
Bloody stuff is usually pretty horrid, and bloody people are in dire straits, and dreary came to take figurative but still pretty intense meanings of “horrid” or “dire.” People in bloodied states are usually not happy about it, and early on dreary also meant “frightened” or “sad.” By the mid 1600s—more likely a softening of “dire or horrid” rather than a twist on “frightened or sad,” the word was applied to situations that make you sad—gloomy, dreary conditions.
So in the figurative sense, the clouds were spilling not blood, but were spilling instead, um . . . blood. And here I’m referring to another original word meaning. The hell with the cliches. Better start crying over spilled milk. Mourn the spilling of milk. Sing dirges because of it. Weep openly.
To spill back in Old English was “to kill, slay, rob of life.” (“Stop me before I spill again!”) And for several centuries of English it had associated meanings related to suicide, destruction, devastation and spoilage. By the early 1100s, to spill was “to ooze blood,” a sense that led by the early 1300s to the meaning of spill as we know it.
That in mind, don’t those dreary days seem a little easier to take now?
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