Recently a facebook friend posted this meme
I didn’t respond to it, but it did make me think. And actually, isn’t that the best kind of post?
Anyway, me being me, I wondered, “What is the verb form of happy?” So I went to one of my best friends
and looked up all the words related to happiness.
Hap – noun; fortune or chance
Haphazard – adjective; mere chance
Hapless – adjective; luckless; unfortunate
Haply – adverb; by chance or accident
Happen – verb; to take place or occur by chance
Happening – noun; something that takes place; occur by chance
Happenstance – noun; chance circumstance
Happy – adjective; characterized by good luck; well adapted, felicitous
Happiness- adverbial form of “happy”
The basic definition of “happy” is:
happy (adj.)
late 14c., "lucky, favored by fortune, being in advantageous circumstances, prosperous;" of events, "turning out well," from hap (n.) "chance, fortune" + -y (full of or characterized by). Sense of "very glad" first recorded late 14c. Meaning "greatly pleased and content" is from 1520s.
My source for this is
(I love this site!)
I confess, I was really searching for the verb form of the word happy. I discovered there isn’t one. I’m stunned! Happy isn’t strong enough to have a verb form, even an ancient one. (I’m always surprised by the words that aren’t fully rounded.) And then there’s the dictionary definition of happy: “chance, fortune, luck.”
I used to teach the same thing as the meme I saw on facebook. And I admit I was always confused by one of my favorite hymns,
Worthy is the Lamb by Johnson Oatman, Jr. You see, the second stanza says,
Worthy is the Lamb, who shed His precious blood
To restore a world to happiness and God;
When no eye could pity and no arm could save,
Jesus for our ransom, Himself freely gave.
I always thought, “Didn’t you mean ‘holiness and God’??” But I’ve learned he was Methodist, and he meant what he said! You see, John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, stressed:
True religion, or a heart right toward God and man, implies happiness, as well as holiness.
(Sermon 7, The Way to the Kingdom) Amen!
There’s more:
Thou shalt delight thyself in the Lord thy God; thou shalt seek and find all happiness in him.
(The Way to the Kingdom)
Another fruit of this living faith is peace…Whether they are in ease or in pain, in sickness or health, in abundance or want, they are happy in God.
(The Marks of the New Birth)
“In recent times, “happiness” has come to sound like a shallow feeling, especially in response to good circumstances. Most of us think that “joy” might be deep, but “happiness” just sounds shallow. But in the eighteenth century, the word happiness carried a much deeper significance. Popular philosophers used it in a way that resonated with classical Greek and Roman ideas about the purpose of life. When they talked about “human happiness” they were pointing to the purpose for which humanity was originally created, and envisioning the complete fulfillment of that purpose. This is why the Declaration of Independence (1776) could list the pursuit of happiness along with life and liberty as basic human rights that came from God. Wesley would never have distinguished between a shallow, merely emotional happiness on the one hand and a deep, settled joy on the other, because the word happiness did not connote frivolity or shallowness to him. Happy is a good word in his vocabulary, and he uses it freely, interchangeably with the word joy.”
(John Wesley as a Happy Puritan, by Fred Sanders - August 13, 2012 https://www.seedbed.com/wesley-as-a-happy-puritan )
I started off with a simple question, Is there a verb form of happy? And I wound up completely somewhere else!
