A Halloween story about vocabulary by Debbie Nevins

Yesterday I wrote about word mix-ups. Thinking a word means one thing only to find out it means another—and that you’ve been using it incorrectly for years. I hope you remember what puce means. And if you don’t, go back and read the preceding entry.

With Halloween coming on, I was thinking about words that mean ghost or spirit and I thought, will-o’-the-wisp! Now, that is a magnificent word! (Yes, yes, it’s a glomming together of four words, will of the wisp, but it is a word.) A will-o’-the-wisp, I thought, is a fleeting spirit or being (Will?) that you can never quite see because it/he is always just outside your peripheral vision, hiding in the … um … wisp? So, I looked up will-o’-the-wisp in the dictionary and found this definition:

1: IGNIS FATUUS  2: a delusive or elusive goal

Huh? Ignis what? Quickly I turned to ignis fatuus and found it to be

1: a light that sometimes appears in the night over marshy ground and is often attributable to the combustion of gas from decomposed organic matter    2: a deceptive goal or hope

Hmmm. Man, when I’m wrong, I’m really, really wrong. Or was I? This is where it gets interesting.

Have you ever heard of UFO sightings? People see unexplained lights in the sky and think aliens are coming to abduct us all? Sometimes those lights are explained away as “swamp gas.” I happen to own several acres of swamp in western Connecticut and I have never seen strange lights or aliens or glowing gases hovering above it, but I guess such a phenomenon does exist.

That flickering, ghostly light is called will-o’-the-wisp. Not because of its scientific explanation, but because of its folkloric explanation.

Now let’s travel back in time to the British Isles—where Halloween itself originated—and find that those ghostly lights are thought to be spirits of the dead, wandering the earth, leading foolish travelers into harm’s way. Unable to enter either heaven or hell, the angry spirits appear as vaguely visible figures holding lanterns, guiding hapless travelers through the dark. Or so the traveler thinks—until he falls off a cliff or into a chasm and is never heard from again. (Suddenly the number 2 definition of will-o’-the-wisp makes sense, too, doesn’t it?)

Ah, and what did those ancient Brits call that mysterious Lantern Man? There are many variations, but in some places, he was called Will of the Wisp. (A wisp is a bundle of straw lit on fire to serve as a torch.) In other parts of the country, he is called Jacky Lantern. Or Jack-a-Lantern.

Aha! Will-o’-the-wisp has a Halloween connection after all! If you explore the folklore behind both Jacky Lantern and will-o’-the-wisp, you will find some fascinating stories! Here are two links to get you started.

www.inamidst.com/lights/wisp/
http://www.mysteriousbritain.co.uk/folklore/will-o-the-wisp.html

And it all began because I wasn’t sure about the meaning of a word! Happy Halloween!