A WORD, PLEASE — jovial

continuity: Next, Professor Aubrey Vellum, with a cheerful little word that came from much farther away than you'd ever guess.

the verdict: You know the uncle at every family party, the one who laughs first, laughs loudest, and refills your plate before you've even asked? Somebody always calls him jovial, and everybody nods. But hardly anyone stops to ask where that word came from.

a word, please: Jovial. A word, please.

the crack: People love to guess that jovial is a cousin of joy, or jolly, or joke. It's a lovely guess, and it isn't true. The real story is better. Jovial comes from Jove, another name for Jupiter, king of the Roman gods and the biggest planet in our solar system. In Late Latin, Iovialis, said yo-vee-AH-lis, simply meant 'of Jupiter.' Now here's the secret. Hundreds of years ago, people believed the planets sent invisible rays down to Earth and shaped the kind of person you became. Jupiter was the lucky one, the generous planet, so if you were born under it, you'd grow up big-hearted, warm, and cheerful. Calling someone jovial wasn't a comment on their mood. It was a reading of their stars.

the collision: The word sailed into English in the late fifteen hundreds, by way of French and the Italian gioviale, said jo-VYAH-lay. Around fifteen ninety, the poet Edmund Spenser used it in The Faerie Queene to describe a kindly, Jupiter-blessed sky. Then, little by little, people stopped looking up. The stars faded out of the word, and only the warmth was left behind. So when you call your uncle jovial, you're really saying he was born under a lucky planet. And if he's that good at refilling plates, he probably was.

the glimmer: People have always wondered why some of us seem to carry our own sunshine, and long before personality quizzes, we simply looked up and thanked a planet for it.

the exit: That's the word. Go find someone jovial today, and tell them they've got a little Jupiter in them.