Curry Favour

An interesting example of Folk Etymology is curry favour meaning to ingratiate oneself by flattery. First, curry is the word meaning to brush or groom a horse, not the Indian spice. And the second word was originally Fauvel, the name of a horse in a satirical French medieval poem from the early 1300s. The French word fauvel from which the horse was named meant "fallow" or "chestnut-coloured" among a few other meanings, but was not related to favour. Fauvel, the equine hero of the poem, was a cunning rascal, the sort of character that might be influenced by flattery or favours.

The phrase to curry Fauvel developed meaning to ingratiate yourself with someone hoping for a favor in return, like you would by currying the rascally horse. At the time that the phrase developed in English, the poem was well known to educated people in Britain. As time went by the poem, and therefore the original meaning of Fauvel, was forgotten, and the word favour was substituted. While the word favour made perfect sense with the meaning of the phrase, the verb curry remained as a curious puzzle.

By the way, the word for the spice curry came a few centuries later from Tamil via Portuguese.

Source: POSH and other language myths by Michael Quinion, 2004, Penguin Books, London

Strait and Narrow

In church this morning, before the service began, I was flipping randomly through my old King James and read Matthew 7:13-14 “…strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life…” The word strait caught my eye as I was familiar with the phrase “straight and narrow”, and I wondered if this was an old way of spelling straight or if the meaning was other than I had assumed.

This evening I opened one of my new books, POSH (see previous post), and found an entry on this very phrase. It turns out that strait is used in the narrow and constricted sense in this and two other verses in the New Testament. In all three cases the word describes a gate, not a pathway, so strait makes more sense than straight. There are, however, other verses which refer to “straight paths”: for example John the Baptist’s message “Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight” is recorded in Mathew 3:3 and in the other three gospels as well.

These two words – strait and narrow – were later used together (earliest recorded use 1834 “…strait and narrow path of duty”). The phrase quickly became straight and narrow (earliest recorded use 1842 “…straight and narrow way”).

It’s easy to see how this error occurred. First, the two words strait and narrow were associated with each other from the Matthew 7 verses, and were assumed to be describing the same thing – pathway. Then confusion with other verses describing straight paths led to the assumption that the word was straight. It makes sense too that the pathway to life would not only be narrow but also straight and direct – wandering neither to the right nor the left. A profound thought, but not what Matthew was saying in this particular verse.

The time – 8 years – between the first records of the two spellings of the phrase is amazingly short. Keep in mind that a word or phrase can be in use for decades before it is found in written form.

That the phrase strait and narrow (or straight and narrow) is so commonly known, although never appearing in the Bible, reminds me of two similar examples. Sherlock Holmes never said “Elementary, my dear Watson” and Humphrey Bogart’s character Rick Blaine in the 1942 film Casablanca never uttered the complete phrase “Play it again, Sam”.