Today’s word of the day, thanks to the Old English Wordhord, is go. Well, actually, the word on Wordhord today is gangan. According to the website, gangan means “to go, walk,” and it is pronounced /ˈgaŋ gan/. The /ŋ/ is a letter in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents the sound we associate with the “ng” of words like sing or bring.

If you check the etymology on www.etymonline.com, it will tell you that go comes from the Old English gan, “’to advance, walk; depart, go away; happen, take place; conquer; observe, practice, exercise,’ from West Germanic *gaian . . . from PIE root *ghē- ‘to release, let go; be released’ (source also of Sanskrit jihite ‘goes away’).” One might wonder if gangan is simply a matter of reduplication, which in linguistics is a morphological process whereby a word, or the root of a word, is repeated, sometimes exactly and sometimes with a slight variation. Sometimes we use reduplication grammatically, such as intensifying or making something plural. Think of “easy peasy” or “itsy bitsy.” But gangan may not be a simple reduplication since it is a strong verb and gan is an irregular verb. I’m guessing that the story is much more interesting.

BTW, go is one of only two verbs in English which take their past tense from an entirely different verb. Went was originally the past tense and past participle of wend, which means “to pursue or direct (one’s way)” or “to proceed or go,” (https://www.dictionary.com/browse/wend), not much different from go. The only use I can think of for wend is the expression “to wend one’s way,” and I suspect that that usage has to do with alliteration rather than any specialized meaning (wend alliterates with both way and one).

On this date in 1938, Thornton Wilder’s classic play Our Town opened at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, New Jersey. The play, which was called by American playwright Edward Albee “the greatest American play ever written,” later moved to New York City’s Broadway where it found success, and won for its author a Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It is also a popular play for college and community theaters. In fact, I directed a production of it at Southern Wesleyan University about 25 years ago.

The play is metatheatrical, meaning that it is in part about theater, and in that respect it shows us the power of theater to inspire and move an audience. One of the main characters is The Narrator, who not only narrates but also takes on some of the minor roles in the story. Another main character is Emily Webb. In Act 1 we meet her as a young woman. In Act 2, she marries George Gibbs, the third main character. Then, in Act 3…. Well, actually, I’m not going to spoil the play by telling you what happens in Act 3. If you want to know, you’ll have to go to the play the next time someone performs it in your area. Yeah, that’s right! You’ll have to go.

The image today is a picture from the original Broadway production of Our Town, found here: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Theatre/OurTown.