Halloween

A cemetery set for All Hallows Day, which is religious - but looks quite Halloween creepy.

Everyone knows Halloween, the holiday, but I'm surprised how few people know the origin of the word (also written as Hallowe'en) which dates to about 1745. It is of Christian origin, though Christian churches often consider the holiday to be not holy at all and more of a pagan celebration.

To hallow is "to make holy or sacred, to sanctify or consecrate, to venerate".The adjective form is hallowed, which appears in "The Lord's Prayer" ("hallowed be thy name"), means holy, consecrated, sacred, or revered.

The noun form hallow, as used in Hallowtide, is a synonym of the word saint. The noun is from the Old English adjective hālig, "holy." The Gothic word for "holy" is either hailags or weihaba, weihs.

In modern English usage, the noun "hallow" appears mostly in the compounds Hallowtide Hallowmas and Halloween. Hallowtide and Hallowmas are lesser known. Hallowtide is a liturgical season that includes the days of Halloween and Hallowmas.

And now, the many variations to further confuse us.

Halloween/Hallowe'en is a shortened form of "All Hallow Even(ing)," meaning "All Hallows' Eve" or "All Saints' Eve."

Hallowmas is the day after Halloween and it is shortened from "Hallows' Mass," and is also known as "All Hallows' Day" or "All Saints' Day."

So, the word "Hallowe'en" means "Saints' evening" and it comes from a Scottish term for All Hallows' Eve. In Scots, the word "eve" is "even" and this is contracted to e'en or een.

Over time, (All) Hallow(s) E(v)en evolved into Hallowe'en.

Hapless

When I was teaching in a middle school and asked students to define words, I often received useless definitions. Asked to define "hapless," someone would inevitably say "without hap"

Hapless could be defined as "having no luck." 

"Does hap mean luck?" a student might then ask.

My hapless (unfortunate) students did not want to dig down into words, which was why I eventually began to teach etymologies for words I thought would be interesting to dissect.

Hapless literally does mean "without hap," and "hap" is another word for fortune or luck. Hap derives from an Old Norse word for "good luck." That word is also the source of our happen and happy.

There are other English words that might be more likely used to describe those lacking good fortune: ill-starred, ill-fated, unlucky, and luckless. My young students would probably prefer "luckless" which clearly means without luck.

"No one knows what a hap is," they would tell me.

"But now YOU know," I would reply. "Next word: smug."

The Cobra Effect

The "cobra effect" is the term used for when an attempted solution to a problem makes the problem worse. This unintended consequence is often is used to describe environmental, economic and political solutions that work in reverse.

The term "cobra effect" originated when there was still British rule in India. The British government wanted to reduce the number of dangerous, venomous cobra snakes in Delhi. They offered a bounty for every dead cobra. So, people were killing them and collecting the bounty. At first, the idea worked. But some enterprising people began to breed cobras to collect more bounties. The government became aware of this abuse and ended the reward program. The cobra breeders had no use for the snakes and released their stock (though it's not clear why people didn't just kill them while they had them in captivity) and as a result, the wild cobra population further increased.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change tried an incentive scheme in 2005 in an effort to greenhouse gases. If a company disposed of polluting gases it would be rewarded with carbon credits that could be converted into cash. The price for the credits was based on how much damage the pollutant was to the environment. The highest credit price went to HFC-23, a byproduct of a common coolant. As with the cobras, companies began to produce more and more of this coolant so that they could destroy more of the HFC-23 byproduct waste gas and get additional credits

This RadioLab program gives many other examples.