Words Rah Loves: Widdershins

In the novel I'm reading, one of the characters walks widdershins three times around a burned house, and he does this to keep the ghost who presumably inhabits the remains from following him.

Ah, widdershins! I love this word.

It comes from one of my favorite languages, German, and is used chiefly by my favorite people, the Scots. The Middle Low German weddersinnes comes from wider, meaning against or back, and sinnen, meaning to travel or go (or "in the direction of," depending on which etymological source you're looking at). So widdershins means to go in a direction contrary to the journey of the sun, or anticlockwise.

According to Wikipedia (who supposedly got it straight from the Oxford English Dictionary, the horse's mouth of dictionaries), the first use of the word comes from the early 1500s: Widdersyns start my hair. Which is a lovely way of saying your hair is standing on end.

It's almost onomatopoetic, isn't it? Widdershins sounds a little off kilter, like not only are you walking the absolutely wrong direction (because everyone walks clockwise), but you're probably a little tipsy while you're doing it.

This is a word clearly underused. I'm going to walk widdershins around my cave right now, just so I can tell someone I did it.

Unfortunately, I might come to a bad end if I do this. Walking widdershins around something, especially a church, is supposed to be very unlucky. Which makes me wonder why the guy in the novel I'm reading did that, especially because he is a Scot and should know better. Then again, he's left-handed, like me, and many of us take a...contrary view of this idea that right is somehow right.

Widdershiners of the world, unite! You never know the Good we might do, simply by being contrary. After all, Superman flew widdershins around the world to rewind time and save Lois Lane. That was pretty lucky.