Hello, and happy Tuesday. I apologize for giving yesterday a miss and being late today, but it’s been busy here in my academic cage. A couple of months ago, back before I decided I have no spare time, I had started to try to find books or documents on the different stages of English, and as part of that, I had purchased two books, Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf and the Barnes and Noble-published Canterbury Tales, that contained both the original, written language, and a translation into modern English. I had hoped to learn Old English while reading Beowulf, but, as per usual, I have over-estimated my abilities. Luckily, the translation is wonderful and worth reading even if you’re not interested in Old English. I can’t say the same of Barnes and Nobles’ house translator, but that version of the Canterbury Tales is well worth it if you’re interested in Middle English.
“Silly” is used extensively in the book to describe various characters, but with a different meaning than it has today. In modern usage, it means something along the lines of trivial, harmlessly deficient or simpleness. It has evolved from West Germanic and Old English seli
, ultimately from OTeut. type *s
ligo- f. *sli-z luck, happiness. In its earliest use, this was the meaning of silly (written seely at that time), and is the sense that was intended by Chaucer. It also meant pious, holy, and harmless. Over time, it came to mean helpless or deserving of pity, which was a primary meaning at the time when the spelling switched from seely to silly. From there, it developed the sense of helpless, defenseless, weak, or feeble, and then, feeble of mind. Interestingly, according to the OED, it is also a conventional poetic epithet of sheep. The fact that sheep are involved in poetry enough to have a conventional epithet is surprising to me.
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