Taking a Walk

            Recently, for my writers group, I polished an old essay on walking, “My Life of Walking.” As I wrote, I remembered a blog, “Run,” which I published on “Be-Worded” in January, 2016, inspired by running errands. In that blog, I contemplated perhaps running to town to walk errands, as opposed to walking to town to run errands. These thoughts led me to ponder the history of the word, “walk,” since I had already written about “run,” so I pulled out my trusty Oxford English Dictionary (OED).

            I was a little surprised to find almost seven full pages devoted to “walk,” its various definitions, and citations of usage. Originally in Old English (roughly 500 to 1100 A.D.), “walk” meant “to roll, toss.” In the transition to Middle English (roughly 1100 to 1500 A.D.), “walk” took on the more familiar meaning of “to move about, travel.” The OED explains this shift in meaning in that perhaps in Old English, the latter meaning was a colloquial one and “when the literary tradition was interrupted after the [Norman] Conquest, and people wrote as they spoke, the original meaning of the verb was no longer current.” (Under this original meaning, “a roll in the hay” and “taking a walk” could be euphemisms for the same bedroom activity.)

            At any rate, the meaning of “walk” as “Action or manner of walking . . . an act or spell of walking or going on foot from place to place, esp. a short journey on foot for exercise or pleasure” became current in Middle English, with the first recorded usages in the OED from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, late 1300’s. The OED lists the phrase of “to take a walk” in this first definition.

All told, the OED includes 46 unique definitions of “walk.” Two particularly caught my imagination. First, walk as “an enclosure in which poultry or other birds are allowed to run freely” piqued my curiosity. Chickens are let out into a walk so they can run. I am not sure how a chicken walk is different from a run, “an enclosure for domestic animals or fowls to range or take exercise in.” Surely, “domestic animals or fowls” can walk in a run or run in a walk or walk in a walk or run in a run! Surely, “domestic animals or fowls” can walk in a run and run in a walk or walk in a walk or run in a run!

The second definition of “walk” which caught my fancy is an obsolete one: “to take air and exercise (on horseback).” The illustrative quotation from 1541 reads, “There be many men in the town and most of them gentlemen, which walk upon their horses, and here and there talk with those ladies.” (I “translated” the quotation into Modern English.) To our modern eyes, it looks like a circus act, perhaps, men walking on horses while talking to “those ladies.” (Bearded ladies, perchance?) One might also say, “I am going to take my horse out for a walk,” meaning not that the person intends to exercise the horse but that the person means to go for a ride on the horse.

LAGNIAPPE:

As I researched “walk” in the OED, I ran across (as opposed to walking across) a word, “walklet,” which not surprisingly means “a short walk.” The OED identifies “walklet” as a nonce-word, one coined for one occasion. The OED lists two usages of the word in print, one from 1832, the other from 1896, so the word got one extra use out of its “one occasion.” Curious, I Googled “walklet” to find in modern times, “Walklet” is a surname. It is also the brand name, Walklet, of a modular system which can be used as a temporary way to adapt public space, such as sidewalks, to make more efficient use of the space. Sadly, because I think it is a cute word, I could find no modern definition or usages of the word. It would be fun to say, “I am fixing to take a walklet to run an errand.”