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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..... As daft as a brush
Very foolish.
On the face of it, brushes wouldn’t seem to be any more
daft than anything else. As the source of the expression
isn’t obvious, various suggestions have been put forward
as to what form of brush is being referred to; for instance:
- The phrase originated as ‘as soft as a brush’ and the
brush is the tail of a fox. This is plausible in that ‘soft’ is
a northern English term for stupid, and foxes tails are
in fact quite soft to the touch.
- The brushes in the expression are the boys that were
employed in the 18th/19th centuries to climb inside
chimneys to sweep them. The theory here, which is
somewhat less plausible, is that the boys were made
into idiots by being repeatedly dropped on their heads
when being lowered down the chimneys.
Nevertheless, as we shall see, the ‘brush’ in this simile is
neither of these; it is, as the dictionary would have it “A
utensil consisting of a piece of wood or other suitable
material, set with small tufts or bunches of bristles, hair,
or the like, for sweeping or scrubbing dust and dirt from
a surface”, that is - a brush.
In looking for early examples of ‘daft as a brush’ in print
we find that it first starts appearing in the 1950s. An
example is in William Morgan Williams’s The Sociology
of an English Village: Gosforth, 1956:
The wives of two members of a kin-group locally
thought to be eccentric and extremely unsociable were
pointed out by several people as ‘gay queer’ and ‘daft
as a brush’. [Gosforth is in Cumbria, UK]
1956 seems later than one would have expected and, as
the word ‘daft’ has always been used more often in the
north of England than in other places, a scan of some
north country references seems in order. Voilà. ‘Daft as
a brush’ it is in fact predated by an earlier variant ‘daft
as a besom’. The earliest citation I can find is a listing in
William Dickinson’s A glossary of the words and phrases
of Cumberland, 1859:
Daft, without sense. “Ey, as daft as a besom.”
A ‘besom’ is of course a brush made from twigs and
a corroboration that the phrase originated with the
‘besom’ rather than the ‘brush’ version comes in another
glossary, from just a few years earlier and collected in
the same area - John and William Brockett’s A glossary
of North country words, with their etymology, 1846:
Fond, silly, foolish. An old Northern word. ‘Fond-as-abuzzom’, remarkably silly.
The use of ‘fond’ to mean foolish predated our current
usage, which is ‘to be fond of something or someone’.
That present day meaning migrated from the earlier
word, which in time came to mean ‘display a foolish
affection for’. In Richard Rolle’s Psalter, 1339, the author
refers to ‘fonnyd maydyns’ (foolish girls). The word
appears in more contemporary language in John Lyly’s
Euphues: the Anatomy of Wyt, 1578:
He that is young thinketh the old man fond.
So remember, if you are visiting the English northern
counties and some old codger says that you are ‘as fond
as a buzzom’, it isn’t exactly a compliment.
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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