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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..... Make no bones about
To state a fact in a way that allows no doubt. To have
no objection to.
This is another of those ancient phrases that we accept
with our mother’s milk as an idiom but which seem quite
strange when we later give it some thought. When we
are trying to convey that we acknowledge or have no
objection to something, why bring bones into it?
It has been suggested that the bones were dice, which
were previously made from bone and are still called
bones in gambling circles. That explanation doesn’t
stand up to scrutiny - ‘to make no dice about it’ makes
little sense. Also, in a 1542 translation of Erasmus’s
Paraphrase of Luke he discussed the command given to
Abraham to sacrifice Isaac and wrote that ‘he made no
bones about it but went to offer up his son.’ Erasmus
wasn’t noted for his visits to the gaming tables and
would hardly have used betting terminology to discuss
a biblical text.
The actual source of this phrase is closer to home and
hearth. In 15th century England, if someone wanted to
express their dissatisfaction with something, they didn’t
‘make bones about it’, they used the original form of the
phrase and ‘found bones in it’. This is a reference to the
unwelcome discovery of bones in soup - bones = bad,
no bones = good. If you found ‘no bones’ in your meal
you were able to swallow it without any difficulty or
objection.
The earliest citation of the phrase in print comes from
the Paston Letters, which include a collection of texts
from 1459 relating to a dispute between Paston and the
family of the Norfolk soldier Sir John Fastolf (Fastolf
was, incidentally, the source of the character Sir John
Falstaff in Shakespeare’s Henry IV). In the Paston
Letters, the context of which is that the litigants are
finally accepting a verdict with no objection, Paston
includes the line:
“And fond that tyme no bonys in the matere.” [and
found that time no bones in the matter]
‘Making bones’ is usually expressed in the negative.
There are rare occurrences of people being described
as ‘making bones’ about this or that, and an early
example comes from Richard Simpson’s The School of
Shakspere, 1878:
“Elizabeth was thus making huge bones of sending
some £7000 over for the general purposes of the
government in Ireland.”
’Make no bones about it’ is now rather archaic and heard
less often than before. It did return briefly during the
1980s, as an example of the ‘waiter, I’ll have a crocodile
sandwich, and make it snappy’ form of joke. ‘Waiter, I’ll
have tomato soup and make no bones about it’ linked
neatly back to the phrase’s culinary origin.
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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