A WORD, PLEASE — maudlin

continuity: Next, Professor Aubrey Vellum, with a word that has been crying for a very, very long time.

the verdict: You know the moment. It's late, someone has the karaoke microphone, and they're singing a sad old ballad with their eyes shut and real tears on their cheeks. Everyone cheers, and somebody leans over and whispers, “Well, that got a bit maudlin.”

a word, please: Maudlin. A word, please.

the crack: Here's the secret: maudlin is a woman's name. It's Mary Magdalene, and Magdalene simply means “the woman from Magdala,” a town on the Sea of Galilee. Her name travelled into English through French, and in medieval England people didn't bother with all those letters. They said Maudelen, mawd-lin, almost exactly the way we say maudlin now. And in their pictures of her, she was nearly always crying. Over the centuries, church tradition had mixed her up with another woman in the Gospels, the one who washed Jesus's feet with her tears. So in painting after painting, and in the religious plays people crowded into the streets to watch, Mary Maudelen wept.

the collision: Then the word wandered out of the church and straight into the tavern. In fifteen ninety-two the writer Thomas Nashe sorted drunkards into eight kinds, and one of them was “Mawdlen drunke.” That's when “a fellow will weepe for kindnes in the midst of his Ale, and kisse you.” A saint's tears had become the tears of a man who's had one ale too many and suddenly loves everybody. People love to say maudlin comes from “mad,” or that it started as a joke about Magdalen College at Oxford. It's a lovely guess, and it isn't true. The colleges at Oxford and Cambridge are pronounced “maudlin” because they kept the old way of saying her name. They're the word's cousins, not its parents. So when your friend sobs through that karaoke ballad, you're hearing the echo of a medieval painting.

the glimmer: Show people the same tears often enough and they start calling them too much, which tells you less about the one crying than about the ones watching.

the exit: That's the word. Go on, sing the sad song tonight, and if anyone calls you maudlin, tell them you're in very old company.