There is an old word hiding in tonight’s name. A hallow was a holy person, a saint; English had the noun from its earliest days and had mostly stopped using it by about 1500. The verb lasted, in the Lord’s Prayer and at Gettysburg, but the noun survives almost only here, in the evening before All Hallows. Even the ending is worn down: even became e’en, an apostrophe stood in for the lost letter, and now most people have dropped the apostrophe too. So tonight, on the one night set aside for the dead walking about, children all over the place will shout a word with a saint inside it and have no idea. A saint, five hundred years retired, going door to door in disguise.