Do you know? - Merry Christmas

Jay! u'll better let us in for free, i have put this in my blog

Merry Christmas! Today we're marking this happy holiday with a look at a few adjectives of joy.

We begin with merry, a very old coinage still used to describe something marked by festivity or gaiety. Merry, which shares ancestral linguistic relations with the Germanic word for short, once meant "giving pleasure or causing happiness"; "agreeable"; "amusing"; "delightful"; "sweet." That sense is now archaic, but merry still suggests gay, cheerful, or joyous uninhibited enjoyment.

Compare the merriment of merry with the joys of jolly. Jolly can be synonymous with jovial; since the 14th century, jolly also has been used to mean "full of high spirits"; "joyous"; "cheerful." On another winter program, we talked about how the word jolly comes from the Old Norse jol (or /yol/), which once named "a pagan midwinter festival" and which also gave our lexicon (and the season) the term Yule.

You'll be cheered to know jovial traces back not to jol but to jove. That Latin-based name for Jupiter, the ancient Roman god of the sky, lives on in both the interjection by jove (used to express surprise or agreement), and also the adjective jovial, meaning "marked by good humor, especially as exhibited in mirth, hilarity, or conviviality." Jovial describes something convivially jolly, or someone who takes a high pleasure in good fellowship, while jolly may suggest the abundant high spirits that go with laughing, bantering, and jesting.