Work Brickle, Work Brittle

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi there. This is Rebecca Stanfield.

Hey, Rebecca, where are you calling us from?

Jackson, Tennessee.

All right. Well, welcome to A Way with Words. What can we do for you, Rebecca?

Well, when I’m married in 1989, I heard my mother-in-law, who was a retired school teacher. She was in her 60s at that point, and she used several phrases and expressions that I had never heard. They seemed almost Elizabethan to me. She described the ne’-do-wells in the community by saying they were not work-brickle. I looked up the word brickle in one of my dictionaries, and it gave the definition as broken. So I wondered if these people who were not work-brickle had not been broken to work.

We talk about breaking horses and mules so that they will work. Work brickle.

We can help you with that.

That one has a long history, not only in the United States, but in the United Kingdom. Brickle itself has its own history, meaning brittle, B-R-I-T-T-L-E, going back more than 800 years in the northern dialects in England and probably comes from the Germanic roots, meaning related to words like break, which is similar to what you were saying, but it’s a different kind of break because there are these two historical meanings of the word. One of them is that the person is unwilling to work, but the other one is that the person is eager to work, and they’re the opposite of each other, which is strange.

In which way did your mother-in-law use it?

She always used it in the negative sense, that they were not work-briple.

Not work-brickled.

And so there are these two opposite meanings, but I think that the way that we can explain them is both cases the person is broken by work. One person is broken because they’re so eager to work that they exhaust themselves and they have nothing left to give. And the other person is broken by work because they’re so weak and lazy that the slightest exertion breaks them into pieces.

So both people are work-brickled, which basically means work-brittle. They’re likely to be broken by the work. You’ll still hear this in the United States, brickle meaning brittle. And you’ll even hear people say peanut brickle instead of peanut brittle, you know, for the little, the crunchy dessert treat. It’s not unheard of.

I’ve always heard of butter brickle ice cream. You know, we don’t talk about butter brittle.

There you go.

That’s it.

Yeah.

It’s one of those terms that I find not useful because it can mean the opposite of itself. And in the context, it’s really hard to tell. I think the willing to work, the eager to work meaning has faded away, and the unwilling to work meaning is the one that’s most used now.

Well, she’s gone on to her reward now, but some of these old terms, you know, we don’t hear them as much anymore, but I think they’re delightful.

You’re doing the work, Rebecca.

Well, thank you, thank you. Thank you so much for sharing it. We appreciate it.

All right.

Well, I enjoyed talking with you.

Bye-bye.

Nice talking with you.

Bye-bye.

Well, Grant and I are eager to hear from you, so give us a call, 877-929-9673, and let’s talk about language.