Stacy Conradt
The Quick 10: 10 Archaic Christmas Carol Words Explained
by Stacy Conradt - December 9, 2010 - 4:50 PM

q10

Many of us – me included – sing Christmas songs without giving a second thought to the lyrics. If you’re paying attention, though, there are some pretty ancient terms mixed in with all of the Fa-La-La-La-La-ing. Here’s the meaning of 10 of them – feel free to impress your friends and family with trivia as you gather ‘round the piano to sing this year (do people really do that?).

1. “Bells on bobtail,” from “Jingle Bells.” This is sometimes misheard as “Bells on Bob’s tail” or “Bells on Bobtail,” as if Bob or Bobtail is the name of the horse. But bobtail actually refers to the style of the horse’s tails – a tail cut short or a tail gathered up and tied in a knot, which you sometimes see in dressage events these days. (Somewhat related: this awesome Toothpaste for Dinner comic.)
2. “There we got upsot,” also from “Jingle Bells. This is in one of the often-ignored verses, but the full lyric goes, “”The horse was lean and lank, misfortune seemed his lot, we ran into a drifted bank, and there we got upsot.” According to Minnesota Public Radio, it means “upset” or “overturned,” as you can probably guess from the lyrics. Judging by its use in other poems and songs of the era, it can also mean “upset” in the emotional sense.

3. “Troll the ancient yuletide carol,” from “Deck the Halls.” In today’s lingo, this phrase gives us visions of mean people on the Internet, lurking on blogs getting ready to launch anonymous and ludicrous attacks on beloved Christmas songs. But in 1800s, the word was often meant with one of its now-little-known usages: to sing loudly and clearly.

4. “Pray you, dutifully prime your matin chime, ye ringers; May you beautifully rime your evetime song, ye singers,” from “Ding Dong Merrily on High.” “Matin” refers to the early part of the morning, so matin chime are bells played in the morning. Although the definition of “rime” is actually a thin coating of ice, I suspect that it may just be an old, alternate spelling of “rhyme.”

5. “Still through the cloven skies they come,” from “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.” If you’re like me, your first thought goes to “cloven hooves” and you wonder what that has to do with the birth of Jesus. The reason they’re called cloven hooves is because cloven means split or parted – the song is referring to the parting of the clouds in the skies for angels to come down and sing.

6. “The holly bears a bark as bitter as any gall,” from “The Holly and the Ivy.” “Gall” means rancor or bitterness of spirit, but it also means bile. I suppose bile doesn’t often taste good.
7. “How are thy leaves so verdant!” from “O Christmas Tree.” “Verdant” simply means green.

8. “Then pretend that he is Parson Brown” from “Winter Wonderland.” I’m including this one because it always baffled me as a kid – I had never heard of a minister referred to as a “Parson.” I thought perhaps Parson was an old-timey name. If you are as naïve as I was, there you go – “Parson” can be a word for a pastor in a non-Roman Catholic church (which is what I am, which is probably why I had never heard the word as a youngster).

9. “The cattle are lowing, the poor baby wakes,” from “Away in a Manger.” This is often misheard as “the cattle are lonely.” If you haven’t grown up in cattle country, you might not know this, but lowing is the deep, low sounds made by cattle. When a cow goes “moo,” it’s lowing.

10. “More rapid than eagles his coursers they came” and “So up to the house-top the coursers they flew,” from “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” which is technically not a song, but I’m including it anyway. “Courser” is another word for a fast horse, and the author of “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (which has been much disputed over the years) uses it to refer to reindeer as well.

Are there any lyrics that have always left you puzzled? Maybe we can figure them out together..

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Comments (43)

  1. I’ve never heard many of these…but I guess that’s no surprise, as I totally HATE christmas music. There’re a few good songs, but mostly it’s rubbish.
    Alright, there was my scrooge moment for the season…back to good cheer & crafting gifts & all that…

    posted by sammylee on 12-9-2010 at 4:54 pm

  2. In my opinion, Christmas has the second-best music of all holidays. I love the older, Renaissance-style carols, such as Greensleeves and the Coventry Carol.

    What’s my favorite holiday music? The Fourth of July. I’m a band director with a serious love of Marches. If you ask my students, I enjoy marches a little too much!

    posted by Jonathan on 12-9-2010 at 5:05 pm

  3. Who the heck is Round John Virgin?

    posted by Dan on 12-9-2010 at 5:19 pm

  4. Dang. I put the word “giggle” in angle brackets after the question above, but I guess the blog software tried to interpret it as an HTML tag. Anyway, no need to flame; I know the lyric really is “Round yon virgin…”

    posted by Dan on 12-9-2010 at 5:21 pm

  5. Is it bad that I knew the true definations of all of these? I sang in a competitive choir growing up and had a habbit of looking up words I didn’t understand.

    Would be interesting to do a post on food mentioned in Christmas caroles as the defination of what makes holiday foods has changed dramatically in the last 400 or so years!

    posted by Megaroo on 12-9-2010 at 5:21 pm

  6. I think you missed what “gall” is referring to in “The Holly and the Ivy.” Matthew’s Gospel tells us that the soldiers offered Jesus “wine mixed with gall” when they crucified him. Gall was the name of a bitter-tasting narcotic, often given to those being crucified to help dull the pain.

    The previous stanzas of “The Holly and the Ivy” also make reference to parts of the holly plant and how they remind us of Christ’s crucifixion (red berries = blood, prickly leaves = thorns).

    This Christmas carol is somewhat unique in that unlike most others, which tend to focus on the warm and fuzzy aspects of Christ’s birth, it points to Christ’s death.

    posted by rev on 12-9-2010 at 5:26 pm

  7. Is verdant really archaic? I used it last week…

    posted by Lindsey d. on 12-9-2010 at 5:52 pm

  8. There is a really nice choral arrangement of “A Visit from Saint Nicholas” that I have both heard and performed, so I’ll count it as a son. Here’s the U of Utah Chorus performing it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAGCBZh2UkY

    posted by Cat on 12-9-2010 at 6:24 pm

  9. song* No, it’s not my son. (Wish I could edit comments.)

    posted by Cat on 12-9-2010 at 6:25 pm

  10. I have been using verdant surprisingly often lately.

    I’m a total unapologetic scrooge for the most part but my mother is christmas crazy so I was pleased to see my memory retained most of these words. Troll and Gall were new ones for me though.

    Thanks for improving my vocabulary Stacy!

    posted by Sarah in Canada on 12-9-2010 at 6:29 pm

  11. I knew all of these, except for coursers, and I might well have picked that up along the way if I was familiar with that piece in which it is used. I feel lucky to come from a family with a real love of language.

    With the way the world is going lately, I wouldn’t be surprised if the next word in Silent Night to become unfamiliar is “virgin” :-)

    posted by Justin on 12-9-2010 at 6:34 pm

  12. When I was a kid, I wanted to know where the land or country of “Orientar” was located…. as in We Three Kings of Orientar.

    posted by Maeveduir on 12-9-2010 at 6:50 pm

  13. Re: number 3 – I’d always heard it as “toll the ancient yuletide carol” as in bells tolling.

    posted by Bert on 12-9-2010 at 6:52 pm

  14. Draft horses usually have their tails docked or bobbed, especially the ones that are pulling plows… or sleighs. I’ve not seen a dressage horse have a bobbed tail, they usually are braided only part way. I’m a horse nerd :)

    posted by Amanda on 12-9-2010 at 7:14 pm

  15. Not a Christmas song, but pretty much the entirety of “Aude Lang Syne” has always puzzled me. I think it’s Irish, right? But I don’t have a clue what “aude lang syne” means. And there’s some stuff about a cup of kindness, yeah. No idea.

    posted by Pinky on 12-9-2010 at 7:16 pm

  16. In Re: 8, the residence where the reverend, the preacher lives is often called the parsonage. A dictionary gives a not unusual definition as such.

    posted by Joseph Singer on 12-9-2010 at 7:23 pm

  17. @Pinky: Auld Lang Syne is Scots English (not to be confused with Scottish Gaelic, which is a different language). It was originally a poem written by Robert Burns, an 18th-century Scottish Poet. The title literally means “Old Long Since” (figuratively, “long long ago”). So it’s actually in an obscure dialect of English! :)

    posted by Noelle on 12-9-2010 at 7:29 pm

  18. Let’s all use “Verdant” tomorrow and report back on how it was received!

    posted by Tex on 12-9-2010 at 8:51 pm

  19. I don’t know any Christmas songs if they’re not played in shopping malls. I wasn’t even aware Jingle Bells had other lyrics. I still hate it anyway.
    Top worst Christmas songs:
    1. Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer. Wasn’t it written by Macy’s department store or something?
    2. Jingle Bells.
    3. Frosty the Snowman.

    The rest are tolerable, but these three songs make me want to friggin strangle somebody.

    posted by Sarah on 12-9-2010 at 9:34 pm

  20. I am so glad that I wasn’t the only child that misunderstood Parson Brown!
    I always heard it as parse and brown. I never bothered to figure out what parse was at the time. And the brown… all I could picture was a snowman made out of dirty old snow with leaves and rocks stuck all over him. Not the most magical of snowmen to marry you off.

    posted by Adam O on 12-9-2010 at 9:54 pm

  21. 4 and 10 were the only two that I was unsure about. I guess that is what comes from reading to much Dickens.

    posted by Virginia on 12-9-2010 at 11:15 pm

  22. “Matin” is not archaic, although you have to be familiar with Christian worship to know it. Similarly, you might not know what “bobtail” is if you haven’t seen a bobtail horse or a bobtail cat or a bobtail dog.

    Not knowing “verdant” or “gall” or “Parson” or “lowing” or “cloven” just reveals a lack of a well-developed vocabulary.

    I guess you’d say I have a lot of gall to make such a claim, but my gall is verdant!

    So much for Mental_floss being only for smart people.

    (PS: Thanks for the feature, I did learn that it’s not “toll the ancient yuletide….”)

    posted by Sven on 12-9-2010 at 11:51 pm

  23. As a kid, I always imagined “Parson Brown” as an actor or entertainer who was before my time – someone like Milton Berle, or (for some odd reason) B.B. King.

    posted by Kara on 12-10-2010 at 2:21 am

  24. I serve with a team of church sign language interpreters, we’ve often had to look up meanings of archaic lyrics in order to interpret them properly. (The church has large video monitors that display lyrics for congregational singing, sometimes the deaf congregants wonder “is that what that means, or are you being free with interpretation again?”)
    Once, a soloist sang a French carol while the video monitors displayed Nativity scenes. I imfamously signed (in meter with the song) “This is a song about the Christ child, look at the pictures on the video; this Christmas song is all in French, and they didn’t translate for me the words!”

    posted by Karl on 12-10-2010 at 8:37 am

  25. I would have been utterly gobsmacked at the suggestion that there could be people that didn’t know what cattle lowing sounded like… until I moved to Boston this summer and, despite myself, found myself amazing the locals with my rustic midwestern knowledge and habits.

    posted by Zach on 12-10-2010 at 10:18 am

  26. I always misunderstood the words in “What child is this”.

    Why would you give a child lard, anyway?

    posted by Bobbertsan on 12-10-2010 at 10:42 am

  27. @Karl: love the signing!

    @Christmas song haters: really? Please, take your hating elsewhere, this is a nice post, and not an invitation for you to whinge.

    (whinge, not whine, look it up, language lovers.)

    posted by Karen on 12-10-2010 at 10:55 am

  28. I understood all of these. However, I am a language nerd. I love “archaic” words. Not that all of these seemed as such. One that always got me was in Deck the Halls…”Don we now our gay apparel”…took me a while to sort out that they were going to be putting on their “happy” clothes…not to be confused with the current definition of gay as a homosexual…still not sure how they got the monopoly on happiness and joy.

    posted by Tiffany on 12-10-2010 at 11:09 am

  29. Our family tradition here in Texas is to watch our VHS version of “A Tuna Christmas” with Joe Sears and Jaston Williams. I crack up to this day every time Vera Carp and Bertha Bumiller mention they have to edit out “Round Young Virgins” from “Silent Night” as evidence to all the dirty words in Christmas Carols.

    posted by Don on 12-10-2010 at 12:01 pm

  30. Sarah, It was written by Robert May, who was indeed a Macy’s employee.

    posted by Sara in Al on 12-10-2010 at 12:31 pm

  31. @Karl, that is so funny!

    posted by Hyacinth on 12-10-2010 at 12:35 pm

  32. As a kid, I always thought Gloria “in excelsis Deo” was “in egg shells we say, oh!”

    posted by JJ on 12-10-2010 at 1:03 pm

  33. @Karl: I LOL’d. I still am actually. Did everyone wonder what was going on when all the deaf congregants started laughing really hard?

    I hear “verdant” on NPR several times a day. The something something and Katherine T MacArthur Foundation, creating a more lush, verdant, and peaceful world.

    Or something close to that. All the sponsor ads start to run together eventually D:

    posted by Nicole on 12-10-2010 at 1:49 pm

  34. … I think it’s a more just, verdant, and peaceful world.

    posted by Nicole on 12-10-2010 at 1:51 pm

  35. I knew most of these. Guess I was a nerdy little kid.

    posted by Heather on 12-10-2010 at 2:10 pm

  36. I was a teenager before I realized that reindeer have hooves, not paws. As in, “Up on the housetop, reindeer paws”. I’m a HS band director, and when I mention this to the kids, they are always surprised, too.

    posted by Jim on 12-10-2010 at 4:49 pm

  37. Yes, people really do that: members of my extended family often “gather ‘round the piano to sing” at Christmas. I know it’s rare and, yes, old-fashioned for sure, but I think it’s kind of sweet.

    posted by Betsy on 12-10-2010 at 5:37 pm

  38. I like that song “Everybody knows a Turkey”. You know, then it goes on about how some mistletoe helps to make the season bright. Just cant find a song by that title.

    ( waiting….waiting…. waiting… for the irony-impaired response…)

    posted by Brent on 12-10-2010 at 6:07 pm

  39. Macy’s was not involved with “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”. It was originally written as a kids’ poem/book for Montgomery Ward by Robert L. May who was one of their copywriters. He later got the sole copyright from MW. His brother-in-law, Johnny Marks, wrote the song and lyrics based on the poem.

    http://www.snopes.com/holidays/christmas/rudolph.asp

    posted by Nate Whilk on 12-10-2010 at 7:48 pm

  40. One of my favorite obscure lyrics, from an obscure verse of “Jingle Bells”:

    “Just get a bobtail nag, two-forty for his speed, then hitch him to an open sleigh, and crack! you’ll take the lead!”

    You’ll “take the lead” because “two-forty for his speed” means that bobtailed horse can trot a mile in 2 minutes, 40 seconds. Pulling a sleigh, yet!

    posted by jmmc on 12-14-2010 at 3:47 pm

  41. I’ve never heard reindeer paws. I’ve heard reindeer paused.

    Am I misinformed?

    posted by Mrs Meg C on 12-16-2010 at 4:19 pm

  42. In “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas”, how many kids today know what it is to “take a look in the 5 and 10″ means?

    Also, how many know what the actual “12 days of Christams” are?

    posted by cashline on 12-17-2010 at 4:09 pm

  43. Are the 5 & 10′s roads?

    posted by loretta5ue on 12-22-2010 at 11:17 am

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