A Brown Study

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Molly White. I’m from San Diego.

Oh, welcome, Molly. What can we do for you?

Well, my mother always used an expression, and she’s the only one I’ve ever heard use this expression. If you are like sitting and spacing out, like daydreaming, she would come in and say, my God, child, I think you’re in a Brown study. And so I’ve never heard anybody use that expression. I’m kind of wondering where it came from. And is she from San Diego as well?

No, she’s from Northern Panhandle, West Virginia, a small town called Sistersville.

Brown study. And so you took that to mean what?

It meant that you were daydreaming, and also the undercurrent meaning was you should really stop and go do something. Yeah, it’s got a long history in English back to the 1500s, and it comes from an older meaning of brown that wasn’t really about color. It was more about shades. It was about the darkness of something. It meant dark or dusky. So you could call something brown like the sky was brown, and you didn’t mean brown in color. You meant that there wasn’t very much light in it. So to say that someone is in a Brown study means that they’re in a, well, we should talk about study as well. To be in a study means to be in a moment of reverie, to be in a moment of deep thought. So a Brown study is a moment of dark thought, a moment of deep reverie. It’s this idea of maybe even gloomy or melancholy thought, or a mental abstraction, as one of the dictionaries puts it, or even meditation or reverie. It can seem unhealthy to other people who aren’t a part of what you’re thinking about. They might think that your spacing out is somehow unnatural or weird or that you’re somehow controlled by outside forces, particularly in the old days when things were a little less understood.

Well, I never thought it was a positive thing. And I wondered if it comes from her background. She’s a third generation of families from Northern Ireland, a county down area, and she was lace-skirt and Irish.

I don’t think there’s anything particularly Irish about it. It’s certainly pervasive through English. I would say that it’s old-fashioned at this point. You’re not likely to hear it. I think people who are well-read would know it. Was she a heavy reader or someone who’s very literate or learned?

Well, she was an English major.

There we go. So she probably had many great works pass through her mind, pass through her hands, pass before her eyes. Molly, thank you for your call. We really appreciate it. Thank you for your information. Take care now. Be well. Bye-bye.

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