Vikings Hidden in Declaration.

I had no intention of doing a Fourth-themed post, but JWB slyly sent me a link to Sophie Hardach’s BBC piece “The Viking word hidden in the Declaration of American Independence,” calling it a “simple but not actually wrong BBC piece on the varied etymologies of the lexemes that ended up in the phrase ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,’ with clickbait Viking headline.” Here’s a sample: Let’s start with the brief phrase “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”. “This iconic line is actually a great demonstration of what a mongrel language English is,” says Tom Birkett, a professor of Old English and Old Norse at University College Cork in Ireland. “Life” is rooted in Old English, a language brought to Britain by Germanic tribes from around AD400-500. “Liberty” and “pursuit” are Latin-rooted, then evolved into French and arrived in Britain with the Norman French conquest in AD1066. And then there is “happiness”: a word echoing with distant voices telling stories of trolls,…