During August – which in some luckier parts of Britain is finally producing seasonable weather – two ‘days’ encourage us to switch off, dial down and generally ease off on normal activities. National Lazy Day falls on 10 August, followed cold on its heels by International Relaxation Day on 15 August. I hope you’re able to celebrate them – though ‘celebrate’ sounds rather too energetic and out of keeping with their spirit!
Arguably, these days are two sides of the same coin. After all, a lazy day would be one for non-work activities you enjoy, which must surely aid relaxation. On the other hand, historically, being lazy and laziness were never thought of as virtues. Quite the opposite, in fact. Sloth, the now possibly antiquated and definitely formal word for ‘idleness’, was one of the seven deadly sins. And being called a lazybones was never a compliment.
In a European, not merely British, context, it seems apt for these special days to fall in August: historically, France shuts down for most of the month, as does Italy with its ferragosto. While life doesn’t grind to a complete halt, many shops and businesses will shut for some, most or even all of this month of summer relaxation.
Relax!
The first Collins Cobuild Dictionary definition states: ‘If you relax or if something relaxes you, you feel more calm and less worried or tense.’
Yes, ‘feeling calmer’ pretty much sums it up, I’d say. In this world of multiple stresses, where many are time-poor, uptight and tense, there’s a lot to be said for conscious relaxation. What people do to achieve it depends, of course, on personal taste. Your favourite relaxation might be my worst nightmare. Person A might go to the golf course, person B to the cinema, person C might meditate, person D, bake a cake, and so forth ad infinitum.** My relaxation activities include pottering/puttering around in the garden or trying to learn a foreign language. What are yours?
Whatever they are, the psychological benefits of relaxation are demonstrable. It can help reduce anxiety and chronic pain, improve mood and outlook, and generally contribute to our well-being. If you’re struggling to find ways that help you relax, this link might be helpful.
What have the Romans ever done for us?
Apart from straight-as-a-die roads, Hadrian’s wall, our alphabet (mostly), our calendar, mosaics and a trillion other things, they gave us tens of thousands of words, among them, to relax, from relaxāre, ‘to loosen, open; to ease, lighten; to cheer up, relax’, a favourite word in that last sense of the great orator Cicero (106–43 bc).
Correction. To be pedantic, relax is one of those words which draw both on Latin and French. Such words are the fourth-highest source of loanwords in English. In the Middle English form relaxen it was first used in medical treatises with the meaning ‘(of a part of the body) to become or make less rigid’, a meaning still used now, for instance when talking about relaxing muscles. In the eighteenth century we started using it in the reflexive form ‘to relax yourself’, meaning ‘to make oneself less tense’, and it wasn’t until the early twentieth that the intransitive use – Relax! Take a chill pill! – arrived.
I’m tempted to speculate this grammatical change reflects how by that era some people were enjoying more spare time for leisure activities and leisure – a word entirely from French – as a concept and the leisure industry had started to take off. For instance, by the late nineteenth century, in the UK everyone took bank holidays as days off work; for most people Sunday was a day of rest; and some even had Saturday afternoon off, meaning that the ‘weekend’ was born. This is a word which gained its modern meaning only in the 1870s and, I believe, until even recently was a word avoided by the very posh. Because it was compiled as long ago as 1902, The Oxford English Dictionary entry doesn’t yet recognise leisure in its fully modern sense, which I’d define as ‘the active use of free time for pleasurable activities’.
What’s in a name?
One of the different things about looking up words on the Collins site is that you won’t merely find definitions. Take a look at lazy, relaxation’s second cousin, for instance. (I mean, I’m respectfully suggesting you do actually look at the entry from the hyperlink above, but perhaps not on Lazy Day itself; that would be too much like hard work!) Over the heading ‘Definition of “lazy”’ in a blue typeface, you’ll see different headings in black, starting with ‘Summary’. If you click on this, you’ll get an overview of all the different kinds of information about the word, including definition, pronunciation, and how to translate it into other languages. Apart from ‘Synonyms’ and ‘Pronunciation’, you’ll see ‘Collocations’ and ‘Examples.’ Those are the two I’m interested in for present purposes.
‘What in tarnation are collocations?’ you may well ask. A collocation is a technical term in linguistics denoting the way certain words tend always to go together in statistically significant ways, that is, not randomly but meaningfully. Call it ‘typical immediate context’ if that makes it clearer.
Think lazy, and what word automatically springs to your mind? My first thought was lazy Sunday afternoon, incidentally the title of a long-ago pop song.
What was/were yours?
I wonder if any of them were listed on the Collins page: lazy afternoon, lazy day, lazy habits, lazy journalism, lazy lunch, lazy stereotype, lazy weekend. If you’re looking at the word in the ‘Summary’ view, you can click on each collocation to reveal several pertinent examples illustrating it in real contexts. The Collins dictionaries lexicography team chose those collocations from the formidable languages databases of contemporary examples that form the backbone of Collins dictionaries.
Hard work pays off in the future. Laziness pays off now.
(Steven Wright)
An interesting question for a lexicographer, then, is how those collocations relate to the different meanings of lazy. So now I’m sort of going to take you inside the mind of a lexicographer – me. But before doing that, it’s worth looking at the ‘Sentences’ option for lazy, too. If you scroll down, you’ll see several sentences selected from the Collins corpora. A scan of those suggests to me the further collocations lazy option and lazy river – of which more, later.
There’s more, though. Going back to when you start keying in a word, the site offers you other suggestions: lazy bed, lazy eye, lazy tongs… and then there’s a lazy Susan.
Here’s the lexicography part. If we drill down together now into the different meanings of lazy, I can suggest how they all fit together in a complex pattern for what seemed to be at first blush an eminently simple word.
Let’s summarise the first meaning as ‘disinclined to work or make an effort’. That covers lazy habits and lazy option.
Second, as the Cobuild definition phrases it, ‘You can use lazy to describe an activity or event in which you are very relaxed and which you do or take part in without making much effort.’ That covers lazy afternoon, lazy day, lazy lunch and lazy weekend. But surely lazy here often has very pleasurable connotations and evokes memories, doesn’t it? They’re summed up for me in one of the ‘Sentences’: The lazy lunches in our walled garden, in the shade of a fig tree. (It’s from the Sunday Times, I’m guessing in the ‘Travel’ or ‘Cookery’ section.)
The third meaning denotes something that moves in a leisurely yet graceful fashion, such as a river, e.g. …a valley of rolling farms spread out along a lazy river.
And the fourth meaning in the Collins Dictionary refers to a letter on a brand on livestock shown as lying on its side. Isn’t it amazing how we apply human attributes even to objects as inanimate as letters of the alphabet?
Where does that leave our collocates of journalism and stereotypes? I’d suggest we need a subcategory of the first meaning – ‘disinclined to work or make an effort’ – which extends it to mental effort, to being intellectually lazy. After all, lazy journalism is the work of journalists who are too bone idle to investigate properly.
And finally, who is this lazy Susan, and what are a lazy bed, a lazy eye and lazy tongs? And how do they fit into the meaning schema?
A lazy eye is an informal way of talking about two things, technically called strabism or strabismus and amblyopia. It attributes to a bodily organ a characteristic or action that applies to a person in their entirety; compare the irritable bowel of the syndrome, or a limb ‘going to sleep’.
A lazy bed is not an item of furniture you doss around in; it’s a technique for cultivating potatoes. As far as I can see, like lazy Susan and lazy tongs, it’s a transferred meaning of lazy: ‘that saves people work and effort, labour-saving’.
And I was almost forgetting lazy river. It’s not just a term for any old languid water course; a lazy river is ‘a thing’; it’s a man-made, slow-moving shallow tract of water you might find in a water park, leisure centre or similar, that probably has curves to mimic nature and is powered by pumps. It’s designed for people to paddle or raft along.
Let’s round this discussion of laziness off with a quotation that contains an important truth: ‘It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.’ (Jerome K. Jerome: Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, 1886.)
Whatever you do on 10 and 15 August, keep calm and don’t stress!
** Occasionally you might find this phrase as ad infinitam, but that’s not correct.
By Jeremy Butterfield
Jeremy Butterfield is the former Editor-in-Chief of Collins Dictionaries, and editor of the fourth, revised edition of Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage.
