“Cheer up love, it might never happen”: a sentence guaranteed to make any glum passer-by feel even worse than they did already. Judging by the sea of frowns at England’s football match against Slovenia this week, or among the audiences of every election debate, many of us feel that it has already happened. Disgruntlement and disapproval abound, and we are it seems ready to cock a snook – or, when it comes to Gareth Southgate , a few plastic beer glasses – at anything and anyone who doesn’t come up to scratch.
Have we finally reached the “pessimum”, the worst of all possible worlds? It might feel as though we have nothing to deliver but a universal thumbs-down, but language tells us that, if anything, such a dismal outlook is nothing new. Take the word “happy”, which didn’t appear in English until the 14th century. Until then, you would simply be “glad”.
When it did come, happiness leant heavily upon chance. “Hap” meant “fortune” or “fate”, so that “perhaps” means “if fate allows”, a “happening” was a chance occurrence, and “hapless” became a description for someone who never has much luck at all. The message seems to be that happiness has always been precarious, if not entirely random.
In fact, a riffle through a historical thesaurus offers just 12 synonyms for “happy”, and over 50 for the opposite. Just like us, our words seem wired for pessimism. After 30 years of studying them, it’s clear that much-loved library o.
