Megabytes

Today, I learned a new definition of the word ‘wick’. Matey looked out the window into our garden and said, “That plant looks wick on one side and dead on the other.” As you might guess, wick used in this context means ‘with life’ or ‘alive’.

This prompted me to rethink the words ‘wicca’, ‘wicked’, and ‘witch’. Matey learned this usage of wick when reading The Secret Garden many years ago. Dickson shows Mary how to determine if a plant has made it through the winter. Scraping a bit of bark off a tree or plant to reveal the green or lack thereof underneath tells you if it is wick.

No dictionary I consulted around the house included a definition to support this usage; until I went to The British Library website. There, I read “wick with means alive with, full of”

Then I got to thinking, does this usage of the word wick derive from Wiccan and/or witch? The Old English word wicca, referring to a spiritual practice celebrating life; traces its etymology to the Germanic wixa meaning consecrated, sacred. Ok, this makes sense.

So in the 1960s, when usage of the word wicked came to mean something cool, the word was actually being reclaimed and reverting to its original meaning!

Then, there is this interesting tidbit from Randomhouse.com:
Villain has some interesting cognates, all deriving from the Indo-European root *weik. The word wick, which is now obsolete except in local dialects in Britain, originally meant ‘house, village, or estate’ and appears in the form -wich in such place names as Greenwich and Norwich. The earlier form of Latin villa was *veixla from vicus ‘quarter or district of a town’ which comes from this root and gives us vicinity. Another form of the root developed into Greek oikos ‘house’, and from that we get diocese from dioikein ‘to keep house’ and economy from oikonomia ‘household management’.