While shepherds watched . . .

How did the shepherds watch their flocks by night without the aid of infra-red technology* ?

This is a false question, based on a misunderstanding of the meaning of the word 'watch'. In the twenty-first century we go out to a stadium to watch a football match, or to a nature reserve to watch birds, or stay in to watch television. To us, the term 'watch' is all about sight, and following action with our eyes.

To our Anglo-Saxon forebears, though, the verb wacian meant to be 'awake' (rather than asleep); the related word waeccian meant to 'stay awake' in order to forestall any possible attack. Thus there are the 'watches' or periods of vigil on board a ship, and the 'night-watchman' who remains awake patrolling the town to ensure that nothing untoward happens to the other, sleeping, inhabitants.

So the shepherds on the hillside near Bethlehem were 'keeping watch' over their flocks, listening rather than looking, ready to scare off wolves or thieves. 'Watch' in this sense virtually means 'guard'**.

* OK, there could have been a full moon overhead that night.

** The watch that you wear on your wrist seems to get its name from some primitive alarm or 'waking' clock, designed to rouse a person from sleep.

Now 'flock' is interesting, too.

The natural assumption might be that the 'flock' of sheep is somehow related to the 'flock' that means 'fluff'', such as we meet in the term 'flock wallpaper'. After all, sheep are fluffy, and if we can have a 'pride' of lions or a 'murmuration' of starlings, surely we can understand a 'flock' of woolly sheep.

But no: there are two entirely different words 'flock'. The Anglo-Saxon one is flocc meaning a troop or band or gathering, whether of people or (other) animals. The other derives from Latin floccus meaning 'fluff' or (metaphorically) worthlessness. There is a lovely word still to be found in big English dictionaries, 'floccinaucinihilipilification', implying 'treating something or someone as not being worth even fluff or dust or a hair or indeed anything at all'. The word is based on a similar composite Latin word introduced into a play by a Roman comic dramatist. They had stage comics even in Julius Caesar's Rome.

So our flock wallpaper has no connection with flocks by night. And that comic 29-letter word must be the only one in the English language containing nine letter 'i's.

While shepherds watched . . .