The balsam’s strange and tangled story

Now a type of fir tree, it was known as a fragrant resin

This year the city of Montreal’s tall, scraggly, much-loathed Christmas tree is a balsam fir, one that began life in rural Quebec three decades ago. I’m grateful to the lean and hungrylooking tree that has attracted so much scorn, because the controversy made me think about “balsam.” The word turns out to have a strange and tangled story, involving everything from ancient spices to London slang.

The balsam fir is a North American species; indigenous peoples used its gum to treat coughs, colds and asthma. Yet long before “balsam” meant the type of tree now often adorned with Christmas lights and ornaments, it referred to a fragrant resin. Ultimately the word may go back all the way to the ancient Egyptians, whose name for a spice that helped to mummify dead bodies found its way into Hebrew and Arabic alike. Taken into Latin and eventually Old English, that name emerged as both “balm” and “balsam,” whose original meaning is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “an aromatic vegetable juice.” Carrots and beets are not what the dictionary has in mind.

The usual means of preserving a corpse is to “embalm” it — a verb derived from the same Latin term. A golden resin highly prized as an antiseptic is often called Balm of Gilead, a Biblical region east of the Jordan River; that resin also goes by the name Balm of Mecca. Before the discovery of antibiotics, sweet-smelling ointments with the power to heal were tremendously valuable, and over the centuries “balm” took on a non-literal meaning: anything that could bring peace or calm. Deep sleep is a balm to an insomniac. The weather on a balmy day is mild and gentle.

Somehow, though, “balmy” also became a London slang word for “insane.” With the British propensity for dropping the sound of the letter “r,” the word is often spelled “barmy.” The noisiest, most disruptive fans of England’s cricket team have been nicknamed the “Barmy Army.” From the unguent of the Pharaohs to flag-waving Cockneys, this word has experienced a long, strange trip.

“Canada balsam” is a turpentine used in making invisible glue. But don’t worry, there’s no balsam in balsamic vinegar — the sweetish, dark-coloured fluid, aged in wood barrels, that has mostly displaced plain white vinegar from our grocery shelves. “Balsamic” is merely a literal translation of the Italian “balsamico,” which means restorative or aromatic. Nor is there any balsam in the gourd-like fruit of a tropical vine known as “balsam apple” or “balm apple.” The sticky, resinous coating of its seeds was enough for the term “balsam” to be applied.

Balsam fir is one of the commonest trees in what botanists call the “Acadian forest” that covers most of the Maritimes. But in Newfoundland a fir is often called a var, and thanks to its high resin content, a balsam fir has a specific name: “snotty var.” A speaker recorded in 1965 for Memorial University’s Folklore and Language Archive put it this way: “Snotty var is too greasy to be good for cutting for winter fuel. All the sap comes out.”

Newfoundland has a wide and vivid vocabulary of its own. What most English-Canadians call spruce beer was sometimes known in Newfoundland as “chowder beer.” Boiled puddings there are “figgy duff,” often served with a sweet molasses sauce named “coady.” It’s unlikely, though, that even in coastal outports, men “blow the Christmas pudding” as they did long ago: when the woman of the house lifted the pudding from the pot, her man would be standing at the back door and would fire a gunshot into the air.

Don’t blow the Christmas pudding, friends. But I hope you won’t think me barmy if I say: May the holiday season bring joy and balm to whatever troubles you.

‘Balmy’ became a London slang word for insane, often spelled ‘ barmy’.