Dressed to Kill

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Scott calling from San Diego.

Hi, Scott, welcome.

Hey there, buddy, what’s up?

Well, I have a professional question for you about medieval knights and the language of chivalry.

Oh, my, okay.

Okay.

Well, I work with an educational program called Chivalry Today, and we help teachers who are studying the Middle Ages and Renaissance by coming into their classrooms and bringing historical displays of arms and armor in for the students to see and try on.

And when I do that, there’s often a lot of talk about the terms and phrases that come from the medieval period.

Well, not long ago, I was reading a novel by the author Bernard Cornwell. I don’t know if you’re familiar with him.

I’m not. Are you great?

I know the name, but I don’t know if I’ve read his work.

He writes a lot of really, really detailed, accurate historical novels.

And so I was reading the novel Agincourt, about the Battle of Agincourt.

And in it he has a very detailed scene describing the arming of a knight, a knight being armed by his squire.

And when this knight has all the pieces of his harness on, the squire turns and says to him, my lord, you are dressed to kill.

And it’s fairly clear from this long build-up to this line that the author is kind of saying, hi, you readers, I bet you didn’t know that’s where this phrase came from.

And my question is, is this where this phrase came from?

Are you suspicious then?

I am a little bit. That seems awfully convenient.

Yes.

Yeah. I mean, it would be great if it was. What a great origin to that.

But I don’t know if that really does go all the way back to the 15th century, or does it even have any military origin at all?

It doesn’t look like it, no. I assume it’s literary license on his part.

The earliest that we find anything like that phrase is in the 1800s.

It turns out that in the 1800s, there was a trend to add to kill after certain kinds of verbs to mean that you were going to do it with force or passion or that you were highly prepared.

So you might have he is got up to kill, meaning he is dressed to kill.

And it doesn’t mean literally to kill.

It just means that you’re going, whatever you’re going to do, you’re going to do it with force and passion and energy.

So, yeah, it just looks like Cornwell just decided to throw that little thing in there for fun.

I assume that when you’re writing these long historical novels, you twist and turn a little bit to make it more interesting for you as a writer and then make it more interesting for the reader.

And he didn’t explicitly say, this is where it comes from, or, you know, comma, thus coining a phrase or anything like that.

Correct, correct.

So he leaves room for doubt.

Right.

And it certainly does make a very long and dry description of armor, kind of, you know, more colorful.

Yeah, but if it jumps at it, you like that.

You sensed that it was wrong, right?

Well, I have listened to you long enough to know when I should raise a red flag.

Yay.

So the students actually get to wear the armor?

That’s really cool.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yes, we let them try on helmets and talk about phrases like throwing down the gauntlet or tripping at windmills and that kind of thing.

Great, yeah.

Very good.

It sounds dangerous.

It sounds fun and dangerous.

And loud.

It sounds really loud.

Hey, Scott, thanks for calling.

Thank you, Martha and Grant.

All right. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

That’s really interesting, though.

You can read historical fiction and pick up the general sense of a time and a place.

But if you’re looking for specifics, you’re probably making a mistake.

But to get the mood and the attitudes and the hierarchies of power and that sort of thing, historical fiction is usually pretty good for that.

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