Will, a listener from South Burlington, Vermont, says he always considered willy-nilly to be his own special phrase. But he’s realized over the years that its original meaning has been replaced. What was originated as will I, nill I or will he, nill he — that is, with or without the will of someone — has come to mean “haphazard.” This transformation likely has to do with its rhyme. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Willy-Nilly”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi.
Hi, who’s this?
This is Will Fulmer from South Burlington, Vermont.
Hi, Will. Welcome to the show.
Thank you. Good to be here.
What’s going on, Will?
Well, I wanted to talk to you guys about a word that has meant something to me since childhood, and when I tell you the story, you’ll understand why, but it’s willy-nilly. You know the word, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
We hear it all over the place these days, but when I was a kid, I heard it probably when I was eight or nine years old, pulled out a dictionary, looked it up, and discovered what it meant. And the way that people use it these days is not what that meaning was in the dictionary back then. And back then, there was only one definition, not a second one.
What do you know about the slide from what it originally meant to how we use it today?
Well, Will, you were looking it up because it’s like your name?
Yep.
You don’t have a brother named Nil or anything.
No, no, but it was kind of the word that was my word when I was a kid because most people didn’t know what it was. And so when you’d hear it and other kids would say, what does that mean? I’d be the one to say, I know, I know, you know, that kind of thing.
Yeah, so it does have a different sense from its original sense. The original sense was with or without the will of the person we’re talking about, correct?
Yep.
Yeah, like will I, nil I.
Will I, nil I.
Yeah, being a negative. But words change, and now it’s more sort of haphazard, wouldn’t you say?
Yes, yeah, and I have looked it up over the years, and I have thoughts as to why it’s changed. I think it’s partly just because people think it sounds like other words, like hell, mel.
Exactly.
Hurley-burley.
Helter-skelter.
Yeah, Hurley-burley. All of those.
But it hasn’t changed within your lifetime. It changed well before you were born, unless you’re hundreds of years old, Will.
Well, let me put it this way. The dictionary that’s right here on the desk with me that I’ve had since I was a kid, which is a Merriam, no, it’s a Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary. It doesn’t say the edition because that front piece is missing now. But it only has the one definition.
Oh, really?
And when I was a kid, and I would look it up in different dictionaries, I don’t ever remember seeing that other definition.
Interesting.
Because you can see it slowly change over time as you look through the historical record over the centuries, since even Shakespeare’s day when he used a form of it in some of his plays. But yeah, I think you’re right. There’s some confusion about the sounding like other words that mean confusion or haphazardness.
Well, you know, am I wrong? I’ve only seen it as a secondary definition, the newer definition.
It depends what kind of dictionary you’re looking at. I think that the collegiate that you have is probably wrong at the time it was published, which wouldn’t surprise me about that particular dictionary, to be honest. And I would also say some dictionaries order their entries by age, and some order them by frequency, and it behooves you to read the front matter to find out which they’re doing.
Which no longer exists.
Which comes first isn’t necessarily good advice on which to use the most.
I got you.
That’s so interesting, because you brought it to a lot of people’s attention. I bet most people don’t know that. It’s sort of like decimate, you know, that word that means to kill one-tenth of a group. But we don’t use it that way now. But it’s sort of an interesting historical fossil.
Right.
But it is that meaning pretty much is a fossil, Will, I’m sorry to say. You can keep using it that way, but people are likely to misunderstand you.
All right.
I can go with that.
Thanks for calling.
Thanks for pointing this out. I love this show.
Thank you.
Thanks a lot.
Bye-bye, Will.
Bye-bye.
Well, that was a thoughtful, thoughtful call, right? Will really put some time into thinking about this word that had a relationship to his name.
Yeah.
And it gave him kind of an allegiance to it. Do you have any words like that, Martha?
Yeah.
All I know was I was told at an early age that Martha meant ladylike. And it just never fit.
Come on.
You know, I was up a tree. It’s not ladylike.
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