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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..... Take umbrage
To be displeased or offended by the actions of others.
There doesn’t seem to be much we can do with umbrage
other than to take it, that is, become displeased - the
word is no longer used in any other context. What is
umbrage exactly? It sounds like some form of distasteful
patent medicine.
Step back to the 15th century and umbrage didn’t mean
displeasure. The word was inherited into English from
the Latin ‘umbra’, meaning shade. Umbrage came to be
used in English to mean shade or shadow, or the foliage
of trees which cause shadows; for example, this piece
from John Lydgate’s 1426 translation of De Guileville’s
Pilgrimage of the life of man:
...my vysage whiche is clowded with vmbrage,
‘Taking umbrage’, that is, sitting under a shady tree, had
then no negative associations, as is made clear in Sir
Thomas Elyot’s The image of gouernance, 1540:
The sayd trees gaue a commodyous and plesant
vmbrage.
Over time, the figurative use of umbrage to mean
displeasure evolved, probably from the simple
association of darkness with gloomy thoughts. In that
meaning, umbrage was first said to be given rather than
taken, as this example from Sir Nathaniel Brent’s 1620
translation of the Historie of the council of Trent shows:
He... therefore besought them to take away all those
words that might give him any Vmbrage.
The shade/disfavour metaphor is made explicit in this
piece from Sir Robert Naunton’s Fragmenta regalia,
1635:
On the fall of the Duke he stood some yeers in umbrage,
and without imployment.
The first record of anyone taking umbrage is in Lord
Fountainhall’s [Chronological Notes on] The decisions
of the Lords of Council and Session, 1680:
The Bishop... took umbrage at his freedom of speech in
the pulpit anent [side by side with] the government.
J. K. Rowling picked up on these associations when
choosing the name of the unpleasant character Professor
Umbridge in the Harry Potter series. The negative link
was reinforced with the choice of Dolores (from the
Latin dolour - pain) as first name.
Is there an English phrase or saying that you would
like to know more about?
Email it to us on [email protected]
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