T. J. RAY, Guest essayist, from Oxford, Mississippi
Retired English professor – University of Mississippi
Mom often rebuked Mr. Catledge for letting his hunting dogs, which he kept in his back yard near ours, bark and bark and bark much of the night. The problem and the dogs went away when he got too old to hunt. She always insisted that neighbors have some duty to those around them not to disturb their world.
Neighbor is a curious word, one that has lost much of the meaning Mom thought it included. In Anglo-Saxon it started as a verb, buan “to dwell.” A person who dwelled close at hand was a neah gebur “near dweller”. What one Anglo Saxon homeowner expected of his near dwellers I don’t know, but in time the word began to suggest a friendliness, a willingness to be compatible to the neighborhood. People thought that folks in the “hood” were somehow special and greeted them with “Hi, neighbor.” A cup of sugar or stick of butter was usually available in a pinch when it was too late to go to the store and the cake was almost ready for the oven.
Recently a friend (who is not a neighbor) shared his frustration with me about one of his neighbors. Seems the neighbor owns one or two large dogs, which he lets out of the pen about five o’clock each morning. These critters immediately set to howling, as though they have a major disturbance to deal with, keeping it up for almost an hour.
I asked my friend how he was dealing with it. His grim expression answered my question eloquently. He doesn’t know how to deal with it. His first impulse was to confront his neighbor, as Mom used to confront Mr. Catledge, but he doesn’t really know the guy, barely knows his name. Another solution was to call the law on the fellow, but he concluded without reason that the problem would return as soon as the law departed. In extreme moments of trying to milk those last thirty minutes of cozy sleep before giving up, my friend fleetingly considered just going up the street, standing in front of the “neighbor’s” house and shooting the offending curs.
What choice did he make I asked: polite request for silence, calling the sheriff, or shooting the beasts. His answer with a sad shake of the head was “None of those.” So there he is, almost waiting for the unwanted wake-up yelping and terribly frustrated by the fact that there is no good way to deal with the problem.
This case suggests that long ago, warm feelings neighbors once had for folks living near them have gone away. Perhaps it is instructive to know that the early Dutch word boer and the modern English word boor come from the same early Germanic “gebur.” The Dutch word signified a peasant (the Boer War) or an insensitive person. Maybe our word for loud, insensitive, uncaring, rude, and thoughtless folks ought to be neighboor.
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THANKS T.J., for this word study. You’ve given us sufficient food for thought to ruminate about ourselves and our neighbors. THE WORDWRIGHT