Foreign Origin of an English Idiom

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Allison. I’m calling from Somerville, Massachusetts.

Hello, Allison. Welcome to the show.

Hi, Allison.

Thank you.

What’s up?

Thank you for having me.

Yeah, sure.

I just had a question about a phrase that I heard recently, actually, in a song on the radio.

There’s a song called Safe and Sound that’s been playing a lot.

Oh, yeah. Capital Cities, right?

Yeah. Yeah, I love it.

So it just got me thinking about the phrase safe and sound and how, you know, I’ve seen it in books a lot, but mostly in the context of, like, parents checking in on their kids to make sure that they’re safe and sound.

But I was wondering kind of, like, where it came from and if there was any other meaning, like perhaps safe meaning cautious and sound meaning logical or something like that.

I don’t know.

So I just wanted to find out more about it.

Interesting.

Yeah, it’s a pretty interesting question.

We sometimes don’t break apart these kind of idioms at all, do we?

We just keep using them as a single piece.

Yeah.

Right, right.

Actually, usually I discourage people from breaking them apart because there’s not a lot of sense to be found there.

But this is probably a pretty good one.

So safe is pretty straightforward.

We know this comes to English from French for the sauf, S-A-U-F, right?

And it means literally the same thing in French as it does in English, which is you are uninjured.

Right, unharmed, unheard.

And it’s related to salvage and salvation and other words like that.

And in French, actually, they have sauf, which means healthy and safe, which is their equivalent of safe and sound.

What’s interesting is this expression shows in it the history of English because the first word comes from French, but the second word comes from the Germanic languages.

Right, right.

So I love that.

Embedded in this three-word phrase is the history of English.

Yeah, and the sound there comes from the same root as gesundheit, which means health.

Yeah.

So gesund, right?

Gesundheit, yeah, is health.

But sound comes from the SU-end part of the German word, and it means hail, hearty, healthy, all of one piece.

Sound mind.

Yeah, all of one piece.

Yeah, exactly.

Like a sound mind.

So there you have it.

Safe and sound is English language embedded in three words.

Very interesting.

Yeah.

Thank you so much.

So you think about that every time you hear the song, right?

Yeah.

Oh, definitely.

Definitely.

Okay.

Well, thanks for calling.

Thank you so much.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

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