As we pause to give thanks for family, turkey, and Plymouth in the year 1621, take a few moments to give thought as well to the very word “thanksgiving,” in its lowercase as well as its capitalized form.
This linguistic thought might take three forms. To begin: Thanking turns out to have quite a lot in common with thinking. The reason the words “think” and “thank” look and sound similar is not a matter of chance. Rather, both go back to a root in the ancestral language of English known as Proto-Indo-European: Generally reconstructed as *tong- “think; feel,” this root is found throughout the Germanic languages (for example, German denken “think” and danken “thank”) while also appearing here and there, probably, in Latin (there’s a very marginally attested verb tongēre “know”), Albanian (tëngë “resentment”), the two main dialects of the long-dead Tocharian language of Chinese Turkestan (tuṅk and taṅkw “love”), and possibly elsewhere.
When young children turn “think” into an irregular verb—“think, thank, thunk”—they are doing so by analogy with “drink, drank, drunk,” “sink, sank, sunk,” and the like. And while it’s a mistake, it does contain a hint of etymological truth. There are two takeaways. One: Giving thanks is, or at least should be, a mindful activity. Two: We must strive to keep our mindfulness positive, lest thoughts of love turn into resentment.
A second form the linguistic thought about our word might take concerns not the conjugation of the verb “thank” but rather the multiplicity of the corresponding noun. Although the original meaning of the noun “thank” (Old English þanc) was “thought,” especially “good thought,” it has not regularly been used with this meaning, or as a singular, since the Middle Ages: We give, receive, and say thanks, with our gratitude in the plural.
It is thus not surprising that the first element of the compound “thanksgiving”—first found in the meaning “giving thanks, especially to God” in the middle of the sixteenth century, a century before the Pilgrims—is plural. And yet this makes it an unusual compound from the point of view of English today: It is true that a corkscrew is meant to screw many corks and a pile driver to drive many piles, but we do not speak of “corksscrews” or “piles drivers.” (Yes, there’s “almsgiving,” but in fact “alms” is historically a singular—Old English ælmesse—that has been reanalyzed as a plural.) The takeaway: Our very word reminds us that there are many things to be thankful for.
Third and finally, there’s pronunciation. To the extent that people speak of “thanksgiving” in the sense of a general giving of thanks, the stress is typically on the first syllable: “thánksgiving.” But the way to say the holiday is disputed: Some prefer “Thánksgiving,” others “Thanksgíving,” and pretty much everyone moves between the two in ordinary conversation. To some extent, the shift to “Thanksgíving” has probably arisen from what linguists call stress clash avoidance: Speakers tend to try to avoid too many stressed syllables in close proximity, which makes the greeting “Háppy Thánksgiving!” less felicitous than “Háppy Thanksgíving!” On the other hand, it also makes the phrase “Thánksgiving Dáy” preferable to “Thanksgíving Dáy.” The takeaway: You don’t have to care about Psalm 92:1 (“It is a good thing to give thanks unto the Lord”) to understand both that it is better to give than to receive and that it should not be only once a year that we count our blessings as we gather with family and friends in the spirit of thanks.
