Some things about things
Wednesday, 22 July 2026
Joe Bennett is an award-winning Lyttelton-based writer, columnist and playwright. He is a regular contributor.
OPINION: Hustings is a strange word. Politicians are said to go to them during election campaigns, but I have never known what they are. So I looked them up and I learned a thing about the word thing. And although the thing I learned is new to me, it’s as old as the English language.
Thing must be the most generic word in English. Everything’s a thing and a thing can be anything. Things can be possessions – I need somewhere to put my things. Things can be clothes – I need somewhere to take off my things. Things can be circumstances – things look good. A thing can be a task – there’s only one thing I have to do this afternoon. A thing can be an obsession – I’ve got a thing about tortoises. A thing can be an essence – the thing about tortoises is that they move slowly and live long. A thing can be exactly what’s needed – a tortoise right now would be just the thing.
Yet when Mrs C F Alexander knocked up All Things Bright and Beautiful in 1848 she wasn’t thinking of any of these things. She was thinking of the great thing-maker, who made everything from the little bird that sings to our organs of perception and expression:
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Of course there are abundant things that didn’t find their way into Mrs Alexander’s catalogue of things, things like testicular cancer, and the Trump family, and the weevil that burrows under toe-nails in order to lay its eggs. Would Mrs Alexander have considered all these made well? Sadly, it’s a bit late to ask her, and anyway, as Hamlet noted, there’s nothing either good nor bad, but thinking makes it so.
So, things are things, birds are things, body parts are things and even people are things. The party-goers of the 1920s were known as the Bright Young Things. And only last week I went to visit a friend who’s had a rough time of late culminating in a nasty infection – you don’t need the details – and my first words as I stepped into the hospital ward, bearing chocolate, flowers, grapes and a grab-bag of other cliches, were “you poor thing”.
There’s a place in Iceland called Thingvellir. I went there a couple of years ago along with several thousand other tourists. It’s a spectacular spot where tectonic plates meet, and where Icelanders used to. For once every year, over many centuries, chieftains from the various Icelandic tribes would trek to Thingvellir to discuss matters of shared interest.
One tries not to engage the brain on holiday, so it did not occur to me at the time that the Thing in Thingvellir bore any relation to a thing in English. But it does. It’s the same thing. As I discovered when I looked up hustings.
Husting comes from the old Norse for house – which is hus – and for assembly or gathering – which is, wait for it, thing. So a husting was a house meeting, a local assembly.
It wasn’t just in Old Norse that thing meant an assembly. It did so in all the Germanic languages, including Old English. And in Icelandic it still does. Iceland’s modern parliament, which now meets rather more comfortably in Reykjavik, is called the Althing- literally the assembly of all.
As Old English morphed into Middle English the word thing expanded. It went from meaning an assembly, to meaning any matter that might be discussed at that assembly, in other words an agenda item. And since anything at all can be an agenda item, eventually the word thing in Modern English came to mean anything at all. Now isn’t that a thing.