Today’s word of the day, courtesy of Merriam-Webster, is incipient. It is an adjective meaning “beginning to exist or appear; in an initial stage” (https://www.dictionary.com/browse/incipient). I chose it because it seems like the perfect word for January 1^st, the first day of the new year.

You can probably guess, based on the “in-“ prefix, that the word comes from Latin or one of the Romance languages, like French. And sure enough, when we check www.etymonline.com, we find that the word first appears in English in the “1660s, from Latin incipientem (nominative incipiens), present participle of incipere ‘begin, take up; have a beginning, originate,’ from in- ‘into, in, on, upon’ (from PIE root *en ‘in’) + –cipere, combining form of capere ‘to take,’ from PIE root *kap– ‘to grasp.’” By the way, a “combining form” of a word is a form of a word that is found only when used with an affix (a prefix or suffix or in combination with another root word). For example, in English we have the word “electric,” but we also have the combining form “electro-,” as in “electromagnetic.” What we do not have is the word “electro,” unless it’s the name of some super villain in a comic strip.

Today is January 1^st, and throughout history things have started on this date.

On January 1 of 630, Muhammad, with his army, set out toward Mecca, the beginning of the Muslim empire. Now, almost 1400 years later, there are 57 member states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, and there are roughly 2 billion Muslims worldwide.

On this date in 1660, in England, Samuel Pepys began his diary. Pepys is credited with being the first diarist in English literature, though he never actually intended his musings to be published. He kept up with the diary for about 10 years, and then, later in his life, he had brief periods of restarting his diary. He used a kind of code, made up of foreign words, to write the diary, in large part because he recounted his numerous extramarital affairs, sometimes in a fair amount of detail. But he also commented on local and national events, giving us descriptions of the coronation of Charles II and the Great Fire of London in 1666.

On this date in 1785, John Walter began publishing The Daily Universal Register, a newspaper. Walter didn’t start out life as a publisher, but he got tired of the coal business and learned how to be a printer. At first he published books, but he then got the idea of publishing a daily newspaper. Three years later, on this same date, The Daily Universal Register was renamed The Times of London.

On this date in 1804, Jean-Jacque Dessalines, the leader of the slave revolt in Haiti, declared independence from France. Haiti was the first country to achieve nationhood through a slave revolt, and once independent, it outlawed slavery. Unfortunately, the declaration of independence led to the Haitian Genocide, the killing of Europeans, mostly French, by Haitian soldiers. The French then imposed a crippling debt on Haiti that has held the country back since then.

On this date in 1818, the small publishing house of Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, & Jones in London published Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. The story grew out of a contest among Shelley, John Polidori, and George Gordon, Lord Byron while they were all residing in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1816. The contest was who could write the best horror story, but Shelley, encouraged by Percy Bysshe Shelley, turned it into a novella. It has become one of the most influential works of fiction in our literature.

On this date in 1863, Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed over three million African-American slaves in the Confederacy. The proclamation accomplished a couple of things. First, it made the war more about ending slavery than about preserving the Union, which was the primary motivation at the beginning of the Civil War. Second, it made intervention by European countries, particularly England, on the side of the Confederacy much less likely. Interestingly, the proclamation did not end slavery outside of the Confederacy; that chance had to wait a couple more years.

On this date in 1892, the USA opened a facility on Ellis Island for the processing of immigrants, most of whom were coming from Europe. In its first year of operation, the facility processed over 400,000 people. Other things occurred during the next 60 years, but by the time Ellis Island was closed as an immigrant processing center November 12, 1954, it had processed millions of people. For many of these immigrants, Ellis Island was the beginning point for a new life.

January 1, 1, is the first day of what is called the Common Era (or CE). It used to be AD, anno domini, a Latin phrase meaning “the year of the Lord.” It might make sense that Jesus’s birthday be on this date, but we celebrate His birthday on December 25, so January 1 doesn’t really fit. And many scholars believe, based on information about the life and death of Herod, that Jesus was actually born before or during 4 BCE (before the common era). But according to the Gregorian Calendar, which replaced the Julian Calendar because it made things get way out of whack, the modern era, or perhaps the Christian era, begins on January 1, 1; there is no year 0, which kind of doesn’t make sense, but that’s the way it is.

In any case, I do hope that the beginning of the new year promises something wonderfully incipient for you.

The image today comes courtesy of the United States Postal Service, except Word of the Day is NOT closed on January 1^st.