The following podcast contains explicit language.

From New York City, this is Laptopon Valley, a podcast about language.

I'm John McWater and it's time to see out the year.

And I was trying to think of how I would do that this time.

I already did a show about Christmas songs and the words in them, so can't do that again.

And I've been in an etymology mood lately.

You can probably tell from little things I say on the show that etymology is not linguistics,

word histories are like a butterfly collection, they're kind of fun, but they're not the

point.

But I've been kind of in the mood for etymology lately, partly because I'm writing that

book about cussing that I told you about and the chapter on fuck is now finished.

And that involved some etymological digging around.

So I'm just in the mood.

And so I figured if I'm going to be relatively ecumenical, then I'm going to wish you a happy

new year and we're going to look at happy new year, that little expression.

But the problem is that the histories are the words new and year are, frankly, quite

boring.

New goes back to a word that meant new.

Year goes back to a word that meant year and maybe a part of it meant cycle and good

God who cares.

But happy, happy has an interesting history.

Happy is fun.

...