I remember a high school history teacher who, the year after Kennedy’s assassination, related to our class the incredible coincidences between JFK’s and Abraham Lincoln’s killings: both were in the company of their wives; both were succeeded by a Vice President named Johnson; Kennedy’s personal secretary was named Lincoln and warned him not to go to Dallas; Lincoln’s secretary was named Kennedy and warned him not to go to Ford’s Theatre—and on and on.
What I also remember is that she ended the class by saying, “So many coinkydinks!” As a Junior trying to appear as a cool teenager, I remember thinking, “I wouldn’t be caught dead using that ridiculous word.” And yet here I am exactly sixty years later (not quite dead, I am happy to relate) finding that silly word an appropriately light introduction to my essay this morning.
Yes, I wish to relate a coincidence of my own. It was brought to mind last week when I spied a most unusual piece of litter on the sidewalk, one I’d seen hundreds of time in my youth but very rarely in the last few decades: a chewing gum wrapper.
The coincidence I now remember occurred back in the 1980’s when I was sitting at my university office desk reading the newspaper between teaching my classes. I saw a headline— WORLD’S OLDEST PASTIME: CHEWING GUM. The article stated that archeologists had recently excavated a glob of chewing gum that could reliably be dated to over 6,000 years ago. It was composed of a sticky beech tree resin. Today, thanks to the miracle of DNA tracing, a more recent discovery of Stone Age gum revealed that it had actually been chewed by a young woman with dark skin, blue eyes, and brown hair!
The coincidence that morning hit me squarely in my mouth when I realized that as I was reading the article I was chewing a piece of Beech-Nut gum, just to make sure my breath would be “minty fresh” for my next lecture. What an unexpected connection: a 35-year-old English professor and a young woman of 4,000 BC sharing perhaps mankind’s oldest pastime.
Ah, but this coinkydink gets even better. It’s a triple. After I read that article I disposed of my gum and picked up my heavy hardback British literature anthology. I headed down the hall to teach my Sophomore British literature survey class. That day I was covering the Anglo-Saxon period (500 to 1066) when “Old English” was spoken and written. I was thinking about the thousands of words we still speak today which are derived from this early Germanic period in England with its population of Angles and Saxons.
I was still thinking about the coincidence of my Beech-Nut gum and the young Stone Age woman when I remembered one of my favorite Anglo-Saxon words that I always related to my classes. The 800-page book I was carrying under my arm was a derivative: our word book comes from the Old English word “bok”, meaning “beech tree.” I loved explaining that before the printing press, ancient societies wrote their tomes on the bark of the beech tree because it was unique in its smoothness and light gray color, often compared to the color (and texture!) of elephant legs. Both its slight coarseness and its very legible background color made it ideal for scribes.
In less than an hour I had shared a beech-related pastime with a Stone Age woman, and then taught my survey class the intriguing derivation of book — making that remarkable beech tree front and center in my mind three times that morning.
And so all the books we read today derive from that common Anglo-Saxon beech-tree word “bok.” Well, almost all books. When it came to naming the single most important “bok” in Western civilization, we needed a much more august title. Yes, we often colloquially refer to it as the “Good Book,” but its actual name has a more revered derivation. We went all the way back to the ancient Greeks to find a suitable name. This wasn’t just a book, it was THE book. And so the ancients used the refined-sounding prefix “biblio”, and that is why it’s called “The Bible.”
Do you doubt me? I’ll swear on a stack of them that it’s true. You “beech-ya” I will.