balm, balmy, barmy, barm, balsam

It’s been a bit balmy lately, more than one might expect. 

When I say weather is balmy, I mean it is pleasant, even soothing (leaving aside worries about why it might be so warm in November). That word, balmy, is indeed balm plus the adjectival -y. A balm is a fragrant soothing resin, and something that has balm is balmy; by extension, something pleasant and soothing, such as warm sunny weather, is also balmy.

I have been thinking, though, of this passage from Jeremiah 8:20–22 (I’ll use the King James Version, since it’s so often quoted):

The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.

For the hurt of the daughter of my people am I hurt; I am black; astonishment hath taken hold on me.

Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there? why then is not the health of the daughter of my people recovered?

That’s not quite so gentle and soothing, is it? But it gave rise to a quite graceful African America spiritual, the refrain of which goes like this:

There is a balm in Gilead,
To make the wounded whole;
There’s power enough in heaven,
To cure a sin-sick soul.

I’ll leave Gilead aside; in the Bible it refers to an area on the east side of the Jordan River, south of the Sea of Galilee, in what is now northwestern Jordan. The name has also gained another cultural currency thanks to The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. But I’m here to talk about balm.

The balm of Gilead is a specific balm, storax balsam, still produced in the same area. But there are other aromatic resins also called balsams. (And other pleasing extracted vegetable matter can also be balsamic – notably balsamic vinegar.) The word balsam comes from Hebrew by way of Greek and then Latin, always referring to fragrant substances. But when it got to Old French, the Latin balsamum was distilled down to basme, and that became our English word balm (the l was added back in the 1500s to display its classical origins, like the o in people and the s in isle). So, yes, balm and balsam are two versions of the same word, and balmy could have been balsamy.

However, there’s another use of balmy that is not quite so pleasant: to mean ‘insane’ or ‘foolish’ or ‘not right in the head’. It’s not quite so clear how it gained that sense, but eyes quickly turn to the British equivalent, barmy. Some people believe that balmy is the origin of barmy, with some other influence, but others believe that the “other influence” is the whole thing, and that this use of balmy is just based on a mishearing.

The other source is definitely something to do with the head – at least if you’re a barmaid or barman. It’s barm, which has in the past also been used to refer to the head on a glass of beer, but originally – and still – refers to froth that rises on the beer during fermentation. It’s an old Germanic word.

You can see how barmy comes from that, yes? Either from being light in the head, or similarly excrescent, or from foaming at the mouth. Probably not from being scum, though; barm is actually useful – it’s full of yeast and can be used in dough.

With unwanted shifts in the climate, some would say that what we have experienced this week is not balmy but barmy. But what can you do? The summer is ended, and we are not saved.

But now the sun is down, and it’s cooling off. I’ve poured myself a beer and can soothe my soul for the moment. And tomorrow, however balmy it may be, there will be work to do.