A Brace of Birds

I do a little radio show called "What's the Good Word" for Dordt College Radio (KDCR).  Here's The one I wrote for today, January 20, the inauguration day of Barack Obama.                        The menu for the inaugural dinner, held shortly after the inauguration of President Obama, had as its main course a “brace of birds.”  The word brace immediately caught my eye.  I thought I knew what it meant, “a pair of birds,” but I wanted to explore it a bit, since to my mind immediately came a number of other, quite different meanings of brace, both verbs and nouns. Other noun meanings include a pair of suspenders (braces), a kind of drill (a brace and bit), devices attached to the teeth to shape and strengthen them; and a related word, bracelet, the decorative jewelry worn on the wrist.  Some verb meanings are as follows: “to strengthen or support; to make ready for impact; to stimulate or invigorate; to tighten by stretching”; and the variation, embrace, “to hug.”  There are more, but these are some that I know are still used.All of these different meanings of brace, come from the same basic root, Middle English , bracen and the Latin brachia, plural of brachium, which means “arm.”  To put it simply brace means arms. Well, that helps a good deal, doesn’t it?  A bracelet goes on the arm, and when we embrace, we put our two arms around someone.  We have two arms, so somehow brace came to mean a pair:  A brace of pistols or a brace of birds.  When a brace of birds appeared on the inaugural banquet menu, I imagine it indicated two kinds of fowl—Cornish hens and squab, perhaps, or pheasant and duck.  A pair of birds.  We speak of suspenders, the kind we use to hold up our trousers, as braces because it is as if two arms encircle our shoulders to hold up our pants.  Even that drill I referred to, the  brace and bit, has several horizontal and  vertical arms that are necessary for it to work properly.Perhaps our most frequent use of brace is its usage meaning to support or strengthen.  Again the connection to arms seems apparent.  We brace something, perhaps, by putting a support arm across it or under it to strengthen it.  When we nail up a brace, we nail up an artificial arm.  And when we feel ourselves falling, we put out our arms, that is, we brace ourselves, to make ready for impact.  And, of course, many of our young people have experienced with some discomfort the application of shaping and supporting braces on their teeth.The one meaning of brace  that I find most difficult to connect to the root meaning of “arms” is the verb meaning “to stimulate or invigorate.”  We have all taken a bracing hike at some time or another, an invigorating hike.  Where did that meaning come from?  I don’t know.  Perhaps you have an idea.The King James Version of the Bible makes no reference to the word brace.  Esau, apparently never brought home a brace of birds for his father to eat.  But it contains many references to both bracelet and embrace.  One of the more familiar is this from Ecclesiastes:  “There is a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing.”  I learned the truth of this best when as a high school teacher I had hall duty, and one of my tasks was to break up young couples with arms wrapped around each other--locked in embrace.This is David Schelhaas, saying, “What’s the Good Word.”