Lord of the Ring

Hello, hello, and welcome to T.E.A. Time with Tayvin Bayless. If you’re here for the first time, I’m glad you’re here. I hope you decide to stick around. To my returning listeners, welcome back. What’s something you’re looking forward to this week?

A few years ago, my wife and I became Lord and Lady Bayless. I have a certificate and everything. What exactly am I Lord of, you may ask? That is a great question, and I’d like to explore it as part of today’s story.

Before I get into that, I want to introduce a phrase: lord it over.

To lord it over someone means to act superior to them. To use your position, your status, or your advantage to make someone else feel smaller. If your team wins a game and you spend the next week reminding your friend about it, you’re lording it over them. It’s not a compliment. It describes a particular kind of behavior that most of us find unpleasant: the person who can’t resist reminding you that they have something you don’t.

Here’s a quick example: My wife and I have certificates giving us the titles of Lord and Lady. But I’ll try not to lord it over you.

Keep that phrase in mind. And keep in mind the word at the center of it: lord. Because, hopefully, by the end of this episode, I think you’ll see it very differently.

It’s the beginning of 2022, and my wife and I have been married for a year. We were married on January 2nd, 2021, which, by the way, is a numerical palindrome if you write it the American way: 1.2.21. That’s the same number read forward and backward. It makes our anniversary very easy for me to remember. But I digress.

So, it’s the beginning of 2022, and my wife’s birthday is coming up on February 4th. I want to give her something special, but I’m having trouble coming up with ideas. I thought about jewelry, but we had just gotten married, and there had been two rather expensive pieces of jewelry involved in that. I thought about a spa day, but Emma is not really a spa-day kind of person. I thought about planning a trip somewhere, but we were still just broke college students, so a trip wasn’t really in the cards. Nothing felt quite right. After more frantic internet searches than I care to admit, I stumbled across a company called Established Titles.

The premise behind the company’s service is that you buy a plot of land about one or two square feet in size in Scotland, and in return, you can call yourself a Lord. This idea draws from a long-standing Scottish tradition that grants the title of Lord or Lady to landowners. The tradition itself goes back centuries, rooted in the idea that owning land in Scotland carried both responsibility and status. Of course, the plot you’re buying through Established Titles is nowhere near large enough to carry any real legal weight. A plot this small is categorized as souvenir land and does not actually make you a Lord in Scotland. But I thought my wife would love the idea of becoming Lord and Lady Bayless.

The company also commits to planting a tree for each purchase and apparently maintains the land they own as a nature preserve, which gave the whole thing a little more substance than your average novelty gift. It’s a silly gift, but it worked exactly as intended. She thought it was hilarious. Mission accomplished.

Now, I want to bring in a second story, because I think these two things belong together. And the connection will become clear in a moment.

The title of Lord Bayless lives on a certificate on my wall. It’s decorative. It’s a joke, and a good one. But there is another object in my life that carries the real weight of what it means to be Lord Bayless, and for a while, I thought it was gone for good.

A couple of months ago, I lost my wedding ring. I had spent a lot of time working with a jeweler before our wedding, picking out the design. It’s black metal with a hammered texture that reflects the light in interesting ways. It has two bands of rose gold embedded in it, which is the metal my wife’s ring is made of, and it has the Japanese words 永遠にともに engraved on the inside, meaning “together forever.” I love this ring, and I was devastated to lose it.

I’m still not entirely sure how it happened. One morning, Emma looked at my hand and asked where my ring was. It was gone, and I had no memory of taking it off. I searched the nightstand, the bathroom, and the bedroom floor. I checked the pockets of every pair of pants I owned, all three of them. Emma helped me search. We moved furniture. I even checked the refrigerator. Nothing. It was simply gone.

I have a backup silicone ring that I wear when lifting weights, and that became my ring by default. It’s a fine ring for what it is, but it’s definitely not the same. It’s not as comfortable to wear constantly. The snug fit of the stretchy material leaves less room for my skin to breathe. But more than the physical discomfort, it just felt wrong. I would look down at my hand during a lesson and see this plain black band, and I would feel the absence of what was supposed to be there. Emma didn’t say much about it, but I could tell she felt the absence too. It became a quiet, low-level sadness in the background of my daily life.

All of that is to say that losing my ring had been weighing on my mind for the past few months, more than I let on.

Well, the other day, Emma found it. It had slipped between the couch cushions and lodged itself in a narrow crevice. We had looked there multiple times before, but apparently not quite carefully enough. When Emma found it, she came to find me immediately. She actually got down on one knee and asked me to marry her when she presented the ring to me again. I stood there for a moment, probably with a dumb look on my face, before it finally clicked in my brain. Then I put it on, and it fit exactly the way it always had. Comfortable. Familiar. Right. I had thought it gone for good. But sometimes it just takes time for what was lost to be found again.

I am Lord Bayless, and this is my ring.

Am I Lord of the Ring?

Let’s take a closer look at that word: lord.

We started with the phrase lord it over, to act superior, to use your status to make someone else feel small. That’s what the phrase means in modern usage. And honestly, it’s not a flattering meaning. You don’t want to be accused of lording it over someone.

But here’s what I find fascinating. The word lord is one of the oldest words in the English language, and its original meaning is almost the opposite of how we use it today.

Lord comes from the Old English word hlafweard. It’s actually a compound word. Hlaf means loaf, as in a loaf of bread. And weard means guardian or keeper. So lord, in its most original sense, means “guardian of the loaves,” the one who keeps the bread, the provider.

Think about what that meant in the early medieval world. Bread was not a side dish. It was survival. The person responsible for ensuring that the people around them had enough to eat was doing the most important work imaginable. The Lord was not the one sitting at the head of the table, demanding to be served. The Lord was the one making sure everyone else had something to eat.

Over centuries, the word drifted. Lords became aristocrats. Aristocrats became associated with power, privilege, and superiority. And eventually, to lord it over someone became an idiom describing behavior exactly opposite to the original meaning of the word.

That gap between “guardian of the loaves” and someone who uses status to make others feel small is a big one, and it’s one of the more interesting journeys a word has taken in the English language.

So, when I ask whether I am a Lord, I’m not asking about the certificate on my wall. I’m asking about the older meaning. Am I a guardian? Am I a provider? Am I someone who expends their effort for the good of the people around them?

I think it’s safe to say that I am Lord of the Bayless home: guardian of the bread. Or, as we might say in more modern terms, the breadwinner. I, with my wife as Lady, expend my efforts and talents for the good of our family. I am not a real Scottish Lord. But I try my best to be a lord, in the original sense of the word, to my wife and child. And that relationship is symbolized by this ring. Once lost, now found.

I guess that does make me the Lord of the Ring.

And with that, my cup is empty. Thanks for joining me for T.E.A. Time. Until the next pot.