For the Season: Harrow and Combine

            I spent some time on the road the other day, and since it was April and the weather was warm and dry, tractors and farm implements were everywhere--gearing up on farmyards, already at work in the fields, and crawling along the highways.  Sometimes, when I get behind a tractor pulling a disc or a harrow or some other implement, I get impatient, especially if I'm going up a long hill.  I will occasionally pass on the hill in those circumstances, and, if a car is coming from the other way, that can be a harrowing experience.

            You may have noticed that I used the word harrow twice in the previous sentence:  Once to designate a farm implement and once to describe a frightening experience.  Let’s look at harrow a bit more closely and also at some other farm implement words.

            The first syllable of harrow like the first syllable of harvest comes from a word that means “to cut or shear.”   Harvest suggests the time of the cutting or picking of the crop.  And at one time the two words might have had similar meanings.  For this idea of harvesting is retained in harrow when it is used in traditional Catholic theology to describe Christ's descent into hell.  This is sometimes called “the harrowing of hell”; it refers to Christ's bringing salvation to the souls held captive in hell since the beginning of the world.  So the harrowing of hell is the harvesting or garnering of the righteous from hell.

            The two meanings of harrow I have illustrated here are somewhat different in emphasis.  The harrow the farmer uses is a frame with spikes or disks that cut or break up and level ground as part of the preparation for planting.  It literally stresses the ground.  And that's where we get the word meaning frightening of distressing.  The machine stresses the ground, and the scary experience frightens or stresses the person who experiences it.

            Another farm machine that we will see on the roads and fields in the fall is the combine.  I once asked a farm boy why it was called a combine.  "Well," he said, "because that's its name."  He was unaware that the machine was so named because it combined tasks that several machines--or people in the case of shocking oats--had done in earlier times.  And so it came to be called a combine.  By now you will have realized that we have in our language a noun, combine, that accents the first syllable, and when that combine performs its tasks and is “verbed,”  we also accent the first syllable of the word.  We combine oats.  But any other time we use the verb we put the accent on the second syllable, we combine.

            In this piece I have combined harrow and combine, the one word having a history that goes back a thousand years, and the other--when applied to the farm implement--just a few decades.  It would be impossible to talk if we were constantly stopping to be surprised at the stories the words told.  Still, it wouldn’t hurt for us to stop once in a while to appreciate the journeys these words have taken through the years.