Shakespeare

H – He hath eaten me out of house and home – Shakespeare

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Not a hard one to figure out – if a guest is rapacious enough in their appetite and consumes everything in the pantry, then one is eaten out of the house and home and forced to go out for more supplies – hopefully having evicted the house-guest. H proved a difficult letter to find suitable phrases for, but with this one, we get the chance to consider the many phrases whose origins are ascribed to the great William Shakespeare – this particular phrase comes from Henry IV, Part 2, Act 2 Scene 1. As I said under apple of my eye, another phrase ascribed to the Bard, I cannot but help wondering, sacrilegious as it may be, whether Shakespeare originated all these phrases or was simply the first to commit them to paper. The Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust have no doubts though and have a webpage called Shakespeare’s Phrases which cites the phrase and the play in which it appears  – make up your own minds…

Here are a few:-

“The clothes make the man” Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 3

“The be all and end all” Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 7

“Wild goose chase” Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, Scene 4

“Brave New World” The Tempest Act 5, Scene 1.

The last one gives an example of how one phrase has been propagated – Aldous Huxley, surely a man well-educated in the Classics and Shakespeare, used “Brave New World” as the title of one of his own masterpieces which has in turn become a shortcut in any article describing utopian/dystopian paradigms but for all our familiarity with the phrase now, was it in common usage since Shakespeare and before Huxley or only a quote known to the cognoscenti, the literate class? Just as we have already encountered phrases which have multiple theories as to their origins, theories which multiply faster than rabbits in the warren of the World Wide Web (how’s that for a mixed metaphor!) – so with Shakespearean phrases, only by searching all written material and all recorded word, and counting all the occurrences could we truly know the answer…

The Clothes Make the Man – Photo by Taha on Unsplash

Lastly, we have only one “H” Cant language example from Wikipedia‘s excellent article on the subject… Hijra Farsi, from South Asia, used by the hijra and kothi subcultures (traditional indigenous approximate analogues to LGBT subcultures)

A – The Apple of my Eye, Academic – Contranyms…

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“You are the apple of my eye!” – If ever there was an expression that we all use and know the meaning of but which – when you really think about it – does not quite make sense – this is it! The indefatigable Wikipedia has this to say “The phrase “apple of my eye” refers in English to something or someone that one cherishes above all others.” So much for the usage, it then goes on to say “Originally, the phrase was simply an idiom referring to the pupil of the eye.” Wikipedia continues that the earliest recorded usage is from the 9th Century in a publication attributed to Alfred the Great (he of the burnt cakes and the persistent spider) but then refers to Shakespeare and finally to the King James edition of The Bible. Shakespeare is credited with originating so many words and phrases that one has to wonder whether it is merely that he was such a prolific playwright and thus he is the first to write down certain things – after all, who goes around inventing words and phrases – especially a man who played to the hoi polio and to the gentry within the same play – jokes for the former and subtle machinations for the latter. Would it not be confusing to be inventing things? Likewise with the bible – surely the translator from the Hebrew text, used common parlance or idiom to make the Bible understandable. However, both Shakespeare (in Midsummer Night’s Dream) and instances in the bible seem to be using the Apple of Your Eye to refer to the dark pupil at the centre of the eye, or possibly to the entire eye. Personally, as a lover of apples, I always took the phrase to conflate the seeing of and comparison to a beloved object such as an apple…

Photo by Perchek Industrie on Unsplash

My father, who was an academic at the University of Oxford, was fond of pointing out, that “To most of the world, the word Academic, means irrelevant!” That makes the word Academic a contranym – a word which has two opposite meanings – high brow and irrelevant. Other examples are:-
To cleave

Definition 1: to join or adhere closely; cling.

Example 1: The shy baby rabbit cleaved to his mother’s body.

Definition 2: to split or divide, especially by cutting.

Example 2: The hunter uses a Swiss Army knife to cleave the rabbit’s meat from the bone.
To sanction

Definition 1: to permit or grant approval.

Example 1: In some countries, the government sanctions the ownership of guns by private citizens.

Definition 2: to condemn or penalize.

Example 2: In some states, the government imposes sanctions on the ownership of guns by private citizens.

Where does the word academic come from? Plato’s Academy was taught by the great philosopher in the public gardens known as “the grove of Akadēmos,” a legendary Athenian of the Trojan War tales (his name, Latinized as Academus, apparently means “of a silent district”), who was original estate-holder of the site”, see here for more.

Photo by Ray Harrington on Unsplash

Do contranyms make the learning of the English language more difficult than other languages (do other languages also have contranyms? Do please tell…) Not as hard as the verbs at the end of the sentence putting (German) or having to know the gender of objects (many languages) and not always either guessable or logical either! There are not such an onerous number of contranyms to be learned and to dumb down the language by avoiding their use would, I think, be a loss –  so I cleave to contranyms…*