It’s probably a good day to talk about eleemosynary activities we all might engage in, possibly by visiting an almonry or even dealing directly with an almoner. What I’m talking about, of course, is charitable acts and donations. “Eleemosynary” comes from the Latin word “eleemosynarius,” which means compassion. It can be traced even further back to the Greek “eleos:” pity. Churches — large ones, at least — have (or had) eleemosynary departments that coordinated collection of alms for the poor.
In the 1600s, when “eleemosynary” entered English, “alms” was already there. Actually “alms” entered English twice; ones via Old English, which got “almes” from Old High German. Then the word found its way into English via French as “aumonry” (the place where alms are given) and “aumoner” (the person in charge of the giving). The spelling changed from “u” to “l” in the late 1500s.
The Latin word that was behind the “almes” of Old English as well as “aumonry” and “aumoner” from French was actually the same “eleemosynarius.” So the older and still fairly common English word “alms” and the new and obscure word “eleemosynary” are, if you go back far enough, close relatives.
In the late 1800s hospitals were starting to get much more organized than they had been, and many began to include “eleemosynary departments” that looked after the best interests of patients in ways beyond mere surgery or medicine. Those eleemosynary departments still exist, at least in US hospitals, where nowadays the people who work in them are more likely to be called “medical social workers” (and if you call them “eleemosynarists” they’ll probably narrow their eyes when they look at you and the next thing you know you’re under observation in your own room in that hospital).
The aim of such departments could, I suppose, be said to try to put a grin back on the patients’ faces — but not, to be sure, a girn. “Girn” is a Scottish word, probably a derivation of “grin” that means “to show the teeth in rage, pain, disappointment, etc.” And it’s the root of the English word (still in use in England, but not much in the US) “gurning.” This is a game or contest — the sort you might want to organize after a dinner gathering — where the object is to make the funniest or most grotesque face. And I’m not talking about after dinner at the kids’ table, either. The Egremont Crab-Apple Fair in England still hosts the World Championship Gurning Competition, and they claim it’s been held there every year since 1266. The winner, by the way, is decided by the volume of applause from the audience. After that, the winner could probably take their winning gurning face on the road and try to use it to solicit alms — they might claim to be the victim of some horrible accident in a hospital that even the eleemosynary staff couldn’t help them with.
