Silly Changed Meaning

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Rick from Waynesboro, Virginia, and I have a silly question for you.

All right, let’s hear it.

Well, I had a friend who recently told me something that sounds a little silly about the origins of the word silly.

He told me that originally it meant blessed or innocent, so that you could say without any offense or impiety that you wanted to talk to the silly Virgin Mary.

The silly Virgin Mary.

Now, if I’m not going to get excommunicated at this point.

No, probably not.

I think the story is something quite like that, isn’t it?

Yes, yes.

Your friend actually isn’t silly at all in the modern sense of the word.

Yeah, silly is an interesting word that’s gone through lots of different changes.

It goes all the way back to an old English word that means happy or blessed.

And indeed, as your friend says, by the 1400s, you see things like, “Silly art thou, Holy Virgin Mary, and worthiest all manner praising.”

Which means blessed.

Yeah, blessed are you, Holy Virgin Mary.

I haven’t seen Silly Virgin Mary written out that way, but I’ll bet that it was used that way.

And if I remember correctly, the transformation from the early meanings to the modern meanings, it’s a slow gradation, right?

There’s no sudden moment where it goes from A to B.

Right.

There were meanings existing next to each other, like silly could mean worthy of compassion or worthy of pity.

You read in the 1600s about silly nuns, and that doesn’t mean that they’re foolish.

And don’t the sheep figure into this somewhere, that somewhere it became an adjective that was typically describing the lambs in the field?

Yeah, yeah, silly lambs, yeah.

And in Edmund Spencer’s The Fairy Queen, which was a late 16th century, it meant defenseless or weak, you know.

So again, you would see the silly virgin defending herself against somebody.

Right, but we’re still not quite to the modern silly, which means that you’re behaving in an unexpected way, right?

Kind of counter to the norm.

Yeah.

Well, or as the result of being weak or not so strong in the head.

I mean, you can kind of see the progression going along.

Okay, very good.

I see.

So you’re weak and in need of protection, which means you might be a little simple-minded, which means you might act silly.

Yes.

Very interesting.

I love that.

And girl is a similar word.

Do you know that, Rick?

Do you know about girl?

No, I don’t.

Yeah, girl was another one of those words that didn’t used to mean girl.

It used to mean boy.

Whoa.

Is that silly or what?

That’s definitely silly in the modern.

But, you know, English has such a rich, long history that anything could happen.

I mean, it’s like a journey in space, you know.

When you’re in the cryogenic chamber and you’re frozen, aliens would come and play cards on your dinner table, and you wouldn’t know until you got out.

I don’t know, just strange stuff going on.

So, Rick, does it strike you as silly?

Well, just a little bit, but I really expected a Monty Python reference in there somewhere.

Like the Minister of Silly Nuns, I don’t know.

Minister of Silly Nuns, very good.

Yeah, I guess Silly Walks is sort of…

Is there a patron saint of silly?

There should be.

Your friend is right. How about that?

That’s pretty cool.

Thanks for calling, Rick. Much appreciated.

Thank you so much. Have a silly day.

You too. Bye-bye.

Thank you. I guess Rick meant a blessed day there.

Yeah, sure. I’ll take silly as well. I have a four-year-old. I know.

Nice is another word like that that started out meaning not knowing things, being ignorant.

Very interesting.

And eventually it became nice as we think of it today.

I find it significant that these words that we’ve mentioned, silly, nice, and girl, are all very simple words, right?

It’s easier to transform the meaning of a simple word than it is a complicated word.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, if you have a silly question for us, or even if it’s not silly, call us, 877-929-9673, or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.