The holiday season offers revelers countless opportunities to stumble over archaic English phrases, unlikely homonyms, and unexamined carol lyrics.
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| An Arizona woman trims her Christmas tree in her own way, in 1997. |
Lo, though centuries dark and deep cometh the yuletide vocabulary donned now by the Google doodle so we can all fa-la-la-la-la our collective Christmas bliss back a few centuries and, in so doing, find comfort and joy in words and phrases that both gain and lose meaning with age.
This leads us to the 12 dazes of Christmas.
1. ‘Tis, it’s, it is and t’is the season for confusion over the spelling, meaning, pronunciation and lyrics using Old (Olde?) English-ish words and phrases that ‘twere in carols and Christmas tales back in the day.
For the record, it’s correctly rendered "‘tis" which is a contraction of "it is." The rule with contractions is that we put the apostrophes where the letters, not the spaces, are missing.
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