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A section for all you budding etymologists where each week the origin of a word or phrase is investigated.
This week it is..... Turn of phrase
A distinctive spoken or written expression.
‘Turn of phrase’ is a commonplace but rather odd
expression - in what sense can a phrase be ‘turned’?
Ladies are, or at least used to be, sometimes described
as having ‘well-turned’ legs/thighs/ankles, but that
derives from an allusion to the symmetry and precision
of wood turning, which hardly seems appropriate for an
abstract entity like a phrase.
What is a phrase anyway? Well, there’s no exact definition
and so it depends on who you ask. Had you been around
in 1530 when the word ‘phrase’ was coined, you would
have been wise not to have asked the language scholar
John Palsgrave. It was he who first put the word into
print but, confusingly, gave two differing examples of
its meaning. Palsgrave’s aim was to help Englishmen
to learn to speak French and to that end he published
Lesclarcissement de la Langue Francoyse, the first
grammar of the French language.
Palsgrave illustrated the meaning of the word ‘phrase’
by giving examples of phrases in English with their
French equivalents.
“Whan all is doone and sayd, pour tout potaige - a
phrasis.”
In that illustration he was using the meaning of the
word as we now understand it, that is, ‘a small group
or collocation of words expressing a single notion; a
common or idiomatic expression’. That ‘collection of
words’ definition of ‘phrase’ is hardly unambiguous
and could just as well be used for ‘idiom’, ‘saying’ or
‘expression’. There are also many other linguistic terms
that, while they have specialised uses, can all lay claim
to being phrases - ‘proverbs’, ‘adages’, ‘maxims’, ‘clichés’
and so on. Added to that, Palsgrave gave us an entirely
different definition of what Tudor gentry understood by
the word ‘phrase’, that is, not words at all but a ‘manner
or style of speech or writing’. In the same French/English
grammar he remarked on “The differences of phrasys
betwene our tong and the frenche tong”. He went on to
explain “The phrasys of our tong and theyrs differeth”.
By that he meant, not that the English and French use
different expressions (which even the most untutored
student would surely have known) but that the French
have a different manner and style of speaking to the
English.
That ‘style of speaking or writing’ meaning gives us
a lead in explaining how a phrase can be said to be
‘turned’. Before the advent of printing the beauty of
written texts was judged not only on their content but
also on the quality of the writer’s calligraphy - much as
Japanese Haiku is appreciated today. The word ‘style’
derives from the tool used for writing, the stylus, and to
the mediaeval mind writing style was as much about the
craft of calligraphy as it was about the ideas conveyed
in the text. An early handwritten example of Chaucer’s
Clerk’s Tale, circa 1386, used ‘style’ with that meaning:
Therfore Petrak writeth this storie, which with heigh
stile he enditeth.
So, a phrase was a style of speaking or writing, and style
meant beauty of expression. We can now interpret a fine
‘turn of phrase’ as analogous to a skilfully crafted piece
of wood turned on a lathe. John Dryden referred to the
‘turning’ of words in this sense in The Satires of Decimus
Junius Juvenalis, 1693:
Had I time, I cou’d enlarge on the Beautiful Turns of
Words and Thoughts; which are as requisite in this, as
in Heroique Poetry.
Benjamin Franklin - first with many things - appears to
have been the first to use the precise expression ‘turn of
phrase’ in his Letters, 1779:
A new version [of the Bible], in which, preserving the
sense, the turn of phrase and manner of expression
should be modern.
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