Expression from The Canterbury Tales

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Yeah, my name is Jasper Oliver. I’m calling from Lynchburg, Virginia. And thank you so much for taking my call. I have a question for you guys today.

Lynchburg is right in the heart of Central Virginia. And my father, who moved here to teach at Sweet Barrier College back in the late 50s, he came here from Indiana. And when I was growing up, he had this expression that he would always use in the summer when I get brown and tan, and he would say that I was as brown as a berry. And I’ve only met a handful of people that have ever heard of that expression before, and most of them are not Native Virginians. And growing up in the country, I’ve been around a lot of berries. But I never saw any that were brown. The only brown berries that I could think of were nanny berries. And those are the things that are left on the ground after a herd of goats have come through. So I hope that’s not what he was talking about.

Yeah, I don’t think that’s what he was talking about either. Nanny berries. That’s a new word for me. So your question then is, why do we say brown is a berry if berries aren’t brown?

Exactly. Any theories? Any ideas? Suggestions? Possibilities? I thought maybe it could have something to do with a very ripe berry. I know sometimes blackberries can get sort of a brownish hue to them if they’re really, really ripe or in the sun.

Yeah, before they turn.

Yeah, so that’s why I’m calling the experts. Well, first, let’s just establish that brown as a berry is extant in every dialect of English around the world. It is idiomatic and is ensconced kind of permanently, so it’s not particular to Virginia or any one people. The second thing is it goes back well into the 1300s. As a matter of fact, Chaucer uses it in a couple of his works. It talks about a horse being brown as a berry. And then the third thing is, and this is what is probably the key point, brown didn’t used to mean exactly brown. Brown a long time ago, and even in some of the languages that are related to English from hundreds and hundreds of years ago, just meant dark. A deep rich maybe red or a deep rich purple or a deep rich black, but it just meant dark. So in Chaucer, when he describes a palfrey, which is a kind of horse as being brown as a berry, he just means it’s a dark colored horse. And so that phrase from Chaucer, which you’ve got to remember, Chaucer was widely studied for a long time by all the learned people in the English speaking world everywhere, became an idiom in language and it’s maintained its shape and form for hundreds of years, even though the meaning of brown has changed.

Well, that’s fascinating. And it’s wonderful, too, because I loved reading Chaucer back when I was in high school. So is it in Canterbury Tales? Do you know some of the works?

Yes, it is. It’s in the prologue to Canterbury Tales. Yeah. And then another one of his books, Cook’s Tale, I believe is another one of his works. Well, you have given an answer to a question that I’ve had for all my life. So thank you so very much. And now when I use that expression and my son looks at me with, you know, that odd look in his eye, I can explain where it came from.

Exactly. Father will know best.

There we go. All right. Well, thank you all again so much for taking my call.

Our pleasure. Take care now.

Thanks for calling.

All right. Bye-bye.

So in Swedish, Brun, B-R-U-N, could meet a dark color, black, red, red, brown.

Yeah. Well, you think of ancient Greek and they talk about the wine dark sea.

There we go. It’s not red. It’s dark. It’s dark, just meaning that it’s opaque and it has a richness of color.

Exactly. And it’s not talking about the hue or the tone.

Exactly. Interesting. Well, we do solve mysteries, or at least we try to. You can ask us yours, 877-929-9673, or email the story to words@waywordradio.org.