God Rest Ye Merry

...goodness knows what things really mean.

Photo Cliff Scholz

I woke this morning from another dream-filled night, third one in a row, and as I blinked the sleep out of my eyes I thought about the meaning of the Christmas carol “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen”. I’ve been hearing the song all my life, and it might help explain that I was holding the second half of a cup of coffee Mary had poured as this question appeared in my mind under the rising influence of the stimulating plant alkaloid she had skillfully and deliciously extracted from some roasted tropical coffee beans.

It’s never truly winter where coffee grows. That probably means something.

Where do our thoughts come from, anyhow? Would thinking about where our thoughts come from help find the answer to that question? Can I rest merry while thinking about it?

There’s a tropical lushness in the proliferation of such questions in the caffeinated brain.

So anyhow, Mary entered my first question about “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” into a search engine and, turns out there’s some controversy about it. Near the top of the search results was a 2013 article by David Mikkelson on Snopes.com which I will link here. Now I’m not a super big fan of Snopes. I don’t count on anything not being politicized at this point. But after reading it, I felt that this article probably has at least something to add to the discussion.

What it says indicates that the original version of the Christmas carol was published “around 1760” and used the word ‘you,’ not ‘ye’ in the opening line. So it would be “God rest you merry, gentlemen.” Apparently the word ‘ye’ was already antiquated, even back in 1760. The author suggests that the word ‘ye’ was probably added later, to “instill the carol with an older, more formal sound”. My eyebrows went up as I read that. The language got changed later to make it sound old-timey? Huh.

The main focus of the Snopes article was to argue against the idea that had apparently gained traction in some circles that the word “rest” at the time of the song’s publication meant ‘make’ and the word ‘merry’ meant ‘mighty’. So, according to that reading, the first line of the song would mean, “God make you mighty.” The Snopes author didn’t find evidence supporting this contention, and, citing contrary evidence, disagreed. He says the word ‘merry’ in the song means pretty much what people use it to mean today.

Oddly, when I looked up the meaning of the word ‘merry’ just now, the AI-generated results that now mysteriously top the page of a popular search engine seem to suggest that ‘merry’ did mean ‘mighty’ at one time in the history of the English language, and I see references to later articles that repeat this claim. Like Mikkelson, I didn’t find evidence for this in an online etymological dictionary, and the Snopes author didn’t find anything supporting that contention in the Oxford English Dictionary, either. But apparently if enough people are saying it, that’s good enough for AI to include it in search results. Taking this a step further, if the 2013 Snopes article is correct — and granted, that’s an “if” — that would mean that AI, or at least the version of it we common folks are given to use free of charge as part of a “free” search engine, might function as an amplifier of misinformation. And again if so, given the amount of electrical power these new technologies require for processing all that data, this sort of implies that AI might amount to a very energy-consuming form of stupidity. Okay…now things are finally starting to clarify. Just like humans, seems AI can work very, very hard to produce nonsense. And that would be strange and kind of charming except that it’s using energy that could be keeping people warm somewhere this winter. But I guess that’s the price of progress.

A couple years ago, a friend who works with computers for a living told a group of us about an experiment where AI was used to generate citations for scholarly articles which included the names of real authors who had indeed been researching in the specific cited field of study. Problem was, the cited scholarly papers did not, in fact, exist. They were fake. I guess, why bother with actual research and all that time-consuming review of actual published literature on a subject when all we really need to beef up our footnotes or bibliography are some plausible-sounding references? Who looks this stuff up, anyhow? I can only assume someone is working on another AI program whose main task is to untangle the web of untruth spun out by other AI programs. Hard to decide if that’s smart or stupid. But then again, technology wins, either way! However, in those cases where our own lives depend on the validity of the research findings, the whole scenario might start to get a little problematic.

Ironically, the part of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” that prompted my semi-caffeinated inquiry this morning was the word ‘rest,’ which by all indications does mean something different now than it did at the time the song first came out. From what I’m reading in the Snopes article and elsewhere, the first line of the song probably meant something more along the lines of “May God keep you guys happy.”

Okay. Sounds good. Thank you. I’ll take it.

But while we’re at it, why not add in the more common modern meaning of ‘rest’ as in, for example, lie down, maybe close our eyes and actually give it a rest? Most of us seem to need more rest than we get. And speaking of artificial intelligence, given all the hype about it, let’s not forget about natural intelligence, which isn’t getting nearly so much press these days. For example, it’s natural intelligence at work while we are at rest and some extremely important information processing is taking place in our bodies. Astronomical numbers of real-time calculations are happening in our sleep, including information-processing tasks that include for example, healing injuries, allocating nutrients and other resources, eliminating pathogens and regenerating tissues, for starters. This kind of information processing keeps us alive. And that’s not counting our dream life, which is absolutely necessary for people to remain even somewhat sane, so make sure you put dreaming at the top of your to-do list and get right to it. And yes, all this information processing takes energy. So, we rest.

And as for the Christmas carol about those merry gentlemen: Honestly that one was never one of my favorites, but if anyone feels moved to sing it, or maybe some of the other carols with memorable lines like fa la la la-la la, or sleigh bells jingling, and even if you want to give the world a rousing rendition of Good King Wenceslas, great. I’m not gonna question it. I finished my coffee hours ago now and I’ll be happy to hear y’all singing, as long as you don’t mind if I rest a bit while I do. Then I’ll be on my merry way.