BLACK AND WHITE
Are you sitting comfortably?
Good. Then let’s begin:
Black meanders all the way
back to the proto-Indo-European
when blac meant colourless,
pale, wan,
albino even,
thus into the Romance tongues as:
Blanc, Blanco,
Bianca, Bianco, Bianchi,
Blanche – and lest you draw a blank
in Old English blac was fair
of hair and skin
(Ælfred the Unready in his “Bæda”
says of someone they “hæfde blæc
feax” –
they “have blonde hair”), but contrariwise
is black, and dark, and ink,
from Proto-Germanic *blakkaz
meaning “burnt”, from
Proto-Indo-European
*bhleg – to burn, to flash, to
gleam
from base *bhel- “to shine” –
hence
the Celtic sun god Belenos, and Bel
in Babylonian
is “Lord” (Baal,
Beelzebub) and Belarus
is White Russia,
and Belle and Bella
mean “Beautiful”: Belladonna.
In Chaucer’s Middle English we find blaec
surviving as Bleak, and Bleach, and Blanch –
Are you still with me? Keep up. In the reigns
of James and Elizabeth, blac, blake, bleaken,
blacken – to bleach out, make white
comes to mean besmirch, and blac
becomes the colour of colourless night
and things at their darkest look pretty bleak,
but my advice is not to bet on Chess or Backgammon
and try to avoid being run over on zebra crossings.
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