Why Is Going Home So Important to Us?

Source: 12019/Pixabay

As so many people head home for the holidays, it brings up the question of exactly what “home” means to us — not just why individuals are willing to brave the perils of modern holiday travel to get there, but also what the concept of "home" has meant to us over the history of English.

The homes of history

It is perhaps not that surprising that the word “home” is an old one, dating back to Old English “ham” or “hamum.” A similar word is also found in many languages related to English, such as the German “heim” or the Swedish “hem,” which tells us that it is a very ancient way to talk about where we are from, predating English by thousands of years.

In the word’s earliest use, it referred not just to a single home, but more often to a village or a small collection of dwellings that formed a community.

This is why many settlements during Old English times (in the 6th and 7th centuries) included the word “home” as part of their names – something that was preserved in modern place names that have a “ham” ending, as in Birmingham or Goodmanham. In essence, these place names originally meant something like “dwelling place of the Goodman clan.”

Over time, this sense of a collective village dropped out of use, and the word developed its more typical meaning today, of a fixed place where an individual or family resides. However, the idea of belonging and community that the word first evoked remains in the way that we feel about the places we come from being more than just a matter of geography.

Where are you from?

This community sense of home is why, when you ask someone where they are from, most people interpret it as a question of heritage and identity, not just the physical location where they were born. For instance, in a study that asked adolescents in Australia to answer the question “Where are you from?” researchers found that out of 605 responses, relatively few simply stated a geographic place. Most respondents also added details about why they saw their identity tied to their homeland, ranging from, “I’m from Australia, because it's where I belong” to “Australia, because it is the best place in the world.”

The strong tendency to talk about much more than a physical location in answering the question suggests that “home” is about more than geography; it’s about our psychological and emotional experience of a place – something that harkens back to its original more collective meaning.

Your mansion or mine?

While many of us travel back home for the holidays, most of us don’t have the good fortune of returning home to a mansion; we simply inhabit a house. But at one point in time, a house and a mansion meant much the same thing – simply, a dwelling place. To understand the understated mansions of our past, we have to look back at the history of Anglo-Norman rule over England starting in the 11th century with the arrival of William the Conqueror.

After the Norman Invasion, a dialect of French became the language of government in England for several centuries, which brought a lot of French words, including “maison” (meaning house) into English. This word was from the classical Latin word, “Mansion,” meaning “house” or “dwelling,” and both words were brought into English as borrowings via French after the 12th century.

As often happened with French words when they had competing English counterparts (as in the already existing word “house”), the French word became gradually associated with the better, grander version of the thing the native English word described, despite having started off with much the same meaning. So, mansions became the places a Lord lived, and everyone else just lived in plain old houses.

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A similar process of associated French fanciness explains why we have dual names for animals and animal meat, for instance, pig vs. pork and cow vs. beef. The word referring to the animal as served on a platter (pork or beef) is typically the French borrowing, often what it was called when being served to the fancy folks by the servants who only talked about pigs and cows among themselves in the kitchen.

Home sweet home

While maps pinpoint geographic spaces, places on a map are much more than longitude and latitude. Our ideas about what going “home” really means is bound up with a long history as well as with our own experiences and connections. So, whether you are headed to a house or a mansion this season, the most important thing to remember is that the original meaning of home centered on community – and that is what the holidays should really be about.