rehearse

To rehearse is to harrow a field a second time. The word is Old French rehercier — re-, "again," and hercier, "to harrow" — from herce, a harrow: the heavy spiked frame a farmer drags across a plowed field to break up the clods, tear out the weeds, and rake the soil level for sowing. Harrowing is the pass after plowing, the finishing of the ground. And to do it again — to re-harrow — is to go back over earth you have already broken, working it finer, until it lies the way you need it. That is the picture under the actor running her lines and the choir taking the passage one more time: not a fresh effort each time, but the same ground worked again, and again, until it is ready to receive the seed.

The funeral hearse is the harrow's near relative, and the path between them is one of the strangest in English. A harrow is a triangular frame set with spikes. Medieval churches used a frame of just that shape — a triangular or rake-like rack of iron points — to hold the many candles burned over a coffin at a funeral; they called it a herse, after the harrow it resembled. Over time the name slid from the candle-frame, to the bier the frame stood on, to the carriage that bore the coffin, to the black vehicle we mean today. So the word for the vehicle that carries the dead and the word for going over your lines before a play are the same word — both the harrow, one by its shape, the other by its motion.

And here is the catch that the careful reader has to be warned about: the English farm tool called a harrow is not this word. It is a separate Germanic word — probably an unrecorded Old English *hearwa, akin to Old Norse harfr (the English word may even be a Norse loan) — unrelated to the Latin hirpex that gave French herce and English rehearse and hearse. Two words for the identical object, the spiked frame dragged over a field — one inherited through Germanic, one borrowed through French — that happen to mean exactly the same thing and are not kin. It is the elegant false friend in its purest form: not a look-alike with a different meaning, but a perfect synonym with a different ancestry. When you gloss rehearse as "to harrow again," the "harrow" you reach for in English is the stranger; the "harrow" inside the word is the Latin one.

The deep root, honestly, is where the trail thins. The Latin hirpex is said to come from a Sabine word hirpus, "wolf" — the harrow's rank of iron teeth likened to a wolf's jaw — and only tentatively, through that, up to the PIE root *ǵʰers-, "to bristle, to stand stiff," the root of horror (the hair standing on end) and hirsute (shaggy). So if the chain holds, a rehearsal goes all the way back to bristling: the teeth of the rake, the hackles of the wolf, the prickle of dread. But the last link is not secure, and an honest entry leaves it where the scholarship leaves it — confident at the Latin harrow, uncertain at the wolf and the bristle. What is sure is the motion. To rehearse is to work the same ground twice. The cold second pass, the going-over of what you have already done — this is not a lesser kind of labor than the first effort. It is the kind that makes the ground ready.