Hallowe’en vocabulary. Travel thoughts.

Today is All Saints’ Day, a public holiday in many countries, not intended for celebration but to go and tend the graves of deceased family members. Pedro Almodovar’s film “Volver” begins with such a scene and involves a woman supposedly dead reappearing, not actually a ghost, just hidden away for a reason I have completely forgotten. It must be time to watch the film again.

And, of course, last night was Hallowe’en, a celebration which has become Americanised just about everywhere I have been. Friends and family have been sending round photos of their small people dressed up in ghoulish costumes, some of which look expensively impressive or impressively expensive.

Which brings me to Hallowe’en vocabulary, since I found something about it weeks ago. “Ghost” is a good old English word, going back a thousand years, to earliest recorded language. It’s original meaning was “vital spark”, which makes the expression “the ghost of an idea” quite apt. Its most common meaning today, “a disembodied soul” connects to the ancient folkloric notion of the spirit being seperable from the body and thus having a continued existence after the body has died. Hence the idea of haunting and also of opening a window when someone dies, to let the spirit escape.

I like the idea of a “banshee”, originally meaning “woman of fairyland”, but on reflection it’s probably another sexist, anti-feminist term. Banshees, after all, are supposed to be female spirits that wail under the windows of houses to foretell a death in the family. So much for pretty fairies! Mind you, fairies were not always benevolent creatures like the fairy godmothers, but more likely mischievous creatures lime Puck, or even downright nasty. Think of Morgan Le Fay in the Arthur stories.

Then there is a “wraith”, originally meaning the the exact likeness of a living person seen as an apparition just before that person’s death. I suppose that’s why if someone looks very pale and wan we can say they look wraithlike.

And finally: “Ghoul is a relatively recent English word, borrowed from Arabic in the 1700s. Because it’s spelled with gh-, it looks vaguely like the Old English words ghost and ghastly (which share a common root in the Old English word gāst, meaning “spirit” or “ghost”). In fact, it comes from the Arabic word ghūl, derived from the verb that means “to seize,” and originally meant “a legendary evil being held to rob graves and feed on corpses.” The word was introduced to western literature by the French translation of Arabian Nights.”

That’s the topical, linguistic bit over with.

So here’s a little something I came across for the paranoid traveller in most of us:

Read platform number
Hear platform number
Walk to platform
Reread platform number
Get on train.
Worry you are on the wrong train.

Oh, the number of times I have got on a train, only to ask the other passengers if this train goes to my destination.As a student I used to travel home by train at the end of term, changing trains at Manchester. As I was usually travelling in the latish evening I was always concerned that I might fall asleep, miss my changeover and end up in the middle of who knew where.

Also as a student, I spent time as an “assistante” in southernFrance, trying to persuade recalcitrant schoolchildren to speak English. Students did not travel by plane then. Ryanair and Easyjet were things of the distant future. On one occasion my train stopped for half an hour in Paris. There was time to go to a cafe on the station. Imagine my panic when I got back to the platform to find no train there. Then I discovered that it had moved to a different platform.

Phew!