Hark is a word not heard much these days, except for “Hark, the herald angels sing,” which we will all be hearing a lot of very soon.

But first, Thanksgiving. Those directly descended from people who attended that first Pilgrim feast should consider themselves lucky indeed to be here at all. About 50 of the 102 original passengers died during the first winter at Plymouth Colony, starving or freezing or perishing from scurvy and various infectious diseases, which they shared with the natives of the area.

The people who came over on the Mayflower were called Saints and Strangers. The Saints came to escape religious persecution, but the Strangers were seeking opportunity — they must have been pretty desperate — or they were indentured servants.

Indentured servants worked as slaves until their debt was paid. As a colonist said at the time, servants were sold like horses all over New England.

The Saints were no day at the beach. They wanted religious freedom for themselves, but not for Quakers, or anyone else. They didn’t hold with foolishness or frolicking.

The Plymouth colony was not the best place for women. The Pilgrim fathers didn’t believe that women should be educated, and most girls of the second generation weren’t taught to read or write. A visitor from England described the women as old before their years, calling them “A tooth-shaken lot.” Some women bore 13 or 20 children, and saw only 3 or 4 live to grow up. Some women died in childbirth. Under such circumstances women tend to die young; the men had successive wives and families.

I wonder if the women cooked the deer, fish, clams and oysters, fowl and other foods served at the first Thanksgiving, and then cleaned up afterward? Possibly they lucked out to some extent, since Native Americans brought in most of the game, and might have cooked it out of doors over the fire. Men might have played some football-like game back then, but they didn’t have television.

So, whether you are a man or a woman, no matter your religion or ethnic heritage, you should be thankful you are not back at Plymouth Rock with the Pilgrims.

Be thankful, even if you do have to drive across the country, hectically zigzagging back and forth like a clusterfly trying to placate your own relatives as well as your in-laws, and, if you’re a house guest, trying to stay awake during the day and not make too much noise at night.

And trying to avoid discussing politics and religion and whatever else Aunt Mabel and Uncle Charles are going on about. They sound like a skipping record. They sound like two different skipping records playing at the same time, in fact, endlessly reiterating their individual talking points, never listening to each other or anyone else.

Does anyone even have an Aunt Mabel anymore? Everyone used to have an Aunt Mabel.

Does anyone remember what a skipping record sounds like?

It is all right to ask these boring old fuddy duddy questions from now until the New Year, because, as I have previously pointed out, this is the season to hark back.

Meanwhile, word has leaked out from tiktok that Gen Alpha has its own slang language! The word skibidi can mean good or bad, or it can mean nothing at all, used just as verbal filler. Rizz is charisma. Ohio is cringe, uncool, awkward. A skibidi Ohio rizzler is an ungifted flirt, kind of.

Don’t try using this jargon on the kids at your Thanksgiving gathering. First, by the time you read this it may be out-dated, and in the second place, older generations will almost certainly get it wrong and look uncool (or Ohio), which is why the slang was invented. Like, you might use the nonsense term 6-7 incorrectly: “Hey, what’s happening, sixty-seven!”

This reminds me of the way Donald Trump’s conservative Christian audience laughed back in 2016 when he used the term “Two Corinthians.”

The correct way to say “2 Corinthians” is “Second Corinthians,” referring to the second epistle of the Apostle Paul to the Corinthians in the New Testament. Not that I understood what was so funny at the time.

What I’m saying is, know your audience. Have a good week.

(Martha Allen, of Keene Valley, has been writing for the News since 1996.)