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Friday-faced

Today’s Word of the Day over at @HaggardHawks has caused a bit of a stir:

Word of the Day: FRIDAY-FACED (adj.) miserable-looking

— HaggardHawks Words (@HaggardHawks) May 22, 2015

@HaggardHawks Surely it should be Monday-Faced!?

— Lethal Lizzle (@Miss_Lizi) May 22, 2015

@HaggardHawks That's funny, I'd expect a Friday face to be a happy face, unless it's just before you reach that point 😉

— Lynne Stobbart (@DrLynneStobbart) May 22, 2015

Wonder why this has totally reversed? What happened in ye olden times on Sat / Sun? https://t.co/rUEAPu6ARt

— HelenW (@Literarychick2) May 22, 2015

Quite right too: Friday is the stepping stone into the weekend (and if you’re reading this in the UK, you’ve got a bank holiday weekend to look forward to as well). So why so Friday-faced?

Well, one theory suggests this comes from nothing more than Friday being a traditionally unlucky day. Among sailors and travellers, it’s long been seen as bad luck to begin a voyage on a Friday (a belief that inspired this brilliant urban myth), and likewise Friday is also seen a traditionally inauspicious day on which to be married: the name Friday derives from that of the pagan goddess of beauty and fertility, Frigga, who would apparently become spitefully jealous of any brides wed on her special day. 

But is general superstition and ill-starred folklore enough to make someone look gloomy? Probably not. Instead, Friday-faced likely derives from the fact that Friday is a traditional day of fasting, penitence, and abstinence, a religious custom born out of the fact that Jesus is said to have died on a Friday. Although today it’s a tradition most closely associated with Catholicism, abstaining on (what is now) the final day of the working week is actually quite a widespread custom. 

So if you’re Friday-faced, chances are you’re just hungry. But never mind—that’s what weekends are for.

Hurkle-Durkle

Over on the HaggardHawks Twitter feed, today’s Word of the Day is hurkle-durkle:

Word of the Day; HURKLE-DURKLE (v.) to lie in bed for a long time, to lounge around

— HaggardHawks Words (@HaggardHawks) March 28, 2015

It’s the perfect word for a lazy Saturday morning, and we thought you might like to know a little bit more about it.

Like a lot of the words we tweet about, it’s an old dialect term—in this case from eighteenth century southern Scotland. We first stumbled across it in John Jamieson’s Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language, published in 1808, which defined it as:

To HURKLE-DURKLE, v. n. To lie in bed, or
to lounge after it is time to get up or go to work. 
(Fife.)

Jamieson points to durck or durch—an old Germanic word for the hold of a ship—as the word’s probably origin, and perhaps saw some kind of etymological connection between someone lurking in bed and someone lurking in the dim, grimy bottom of a ship. He should really try changing his bedding more often. But oddly, in reduplicative words like these, it’s often the case that the first part of the word is the original root, to which the second part is added later as a rhyming, humorous or playful addition.

So okey-dokey comes from okay. Hoity-toity comes from the old verb hoit, meaning “to act affectedly” or, according to the OED, “to romp inelegantly”. And ultimately hurkle-durkle might in fact come from the old Scots verb hurkle, or hurkill, meaning “to draw the limbs together close to the body”. From there it’s easy to see where the image of someone cosily curled up in bed, reluctant to get up, might come from.

Unfortunately, as is often the case with regional and dialect words, it’s impossible to say with any certainty which of these two theories—if, indeed, either—is correct without more evidence and research. But alas it’s Saturday. And it’s just far too tempting to stay in bed.