Having heard the phrase, "faint heart never won fair lady" for the third time in very short span, I'm determined to find out its origin. Unfortunately, when I Google, I'm getting a bunch of low-quality sites — unlike our StackExchange — that only mention that it's a proverb, and give no clue as to its origin or date of first occurrence. That's what I'm wondering — is it a literary quote, passed down from some famous author into a proverb? When is the date of its first attestation? How familiar would an ordinary Briton be with this saying? (It's a chiefly British saying, right? I don't believe it's popular in the United States.)
Learn English – the origin of the saying, “faint heart never won fair lady”
british-englishetymologyhistoryidiomspopular-refrains
Related Solutions
Googling further, I found this quote from "The Dictionary of Clichés" by James Rogers:
penny for your thoughts — "What's on your mind? (Usually said to someone who is looking pensive.) The saying is from a time when the British penny was worth a significant sum. In 1522, Sir Thomas More wrote (in 'Four Last Things'): 'It often happeth, that the very face sheweth the mind walking a pilgrimage, in such wise that other folk sodainly say to them a peny for your thought.'"
Sadly, Google Books doesn't seem to have scanned that book just yet, but they do have a copy of The Proverbs and Epigrams of John Heywood from 1562 that has this cite:
Fréend (quoth the good man) a peny for your thought.
Learn English – Is the history of h-dropping in English in any way related to the silent h of French
The question of H-dropping in English is a frequently revisited one and the succession of theories put forward could be a topic in its own right.
Without going too far back in time one of the most authoritative sources on the subject is James Milroy who, in a paper titled "On the sociolinguistic history of /h/-dropping in English", published in 1983 proposes an extensive sociolinguistic theory of the phenomenon in the context of Middle English. He is regularly cited by later articles and has penned the dialectology contribution in the volume of the "Cambridge History of the English Language" dedicated to Middle English.
A quick summary of his theory could be that:
- The phenomenon was widespread in 1300, "in the dialects of Eastern England Kent and from Surrey to Lincolnshire".
The tendency was a matter of prestige: "...the regions that were amongst the most important commercially and administratively, and it comes from texts many of which are quite formal in style and learned in content".
It can probably be ascribed to some form of contact with French which were perceived as more prestigious because H-dropping "does not seem a 'natural' change in Germanic... even if there were sporadic tendencies in /h/-loss in OE, the French-English contact situation was the single most important influence on its rapid progress in Middle English".
The story does not stop there because later authors have made a number of objections.
Although H-dropping was well advanced in Medieval Latin (it is today complete in Italian1) the picture was a different one in Medieval French at the time when MFr and ME were in contact.
As in England where different regions showed different situations, the /h/-loss was more pronounced in the South of France (that's where the Latin influence was stronger as well as the largest part of the Plantagenet continental dominion) and in Paris but other parts of France, including Normandy were generally retaining the "h".
The later re-insertion of the 'h' in French that occurred under the influence of Latin affected spelling only, not pronunciation, hence the vestigial 'h-muet' - the 'h-aspiré' being actually a hiatus (glottal stop) preventing the 'liaison'. For instance,
le homard(from German) has a glottal stop butl'homme- note the elision - (from Latin) doesn't.Some /h/ of Greek origin retain the glottal stop such as
le héros. So did words of Germanic originla harpe,le harengor non-Indo-European languagesle harem,le hamac,les haricots2.So the Anglo Norman influence should in theory have spared the /h/ in Germanic words.
Finally, some Swedish and Germanic dialects have undergone some h-loss.
So it seems that French was just a proxy for a phenomenon that in reality had its roots in Late Latin and that in addition English had an endemic tendency for h-loss of its own. This is confirmed by the more general theory of lenition, a general phenomenon of the natural evolution of languages, of which the /h/-loss is actually only the final stage.
All in all the situation is quite different today. As it happens in Present Day English pronouncing the aitches is much well regarded than dropping them - H dropping now being a mark of London Cockney or Estuary English dialects.
Note 1: complete in Italian... except for a few spelling exceptions (like hanno vs anno).
Note 2: here is a short list of French words requiring the h-aspiré. Most of them are not from Latin or Greek origin.
Related Topic
- Learn English – What’s the origin of the saying, “There’s no accounting for taste”
- Learn English – the origin of the phrase “two nations divided by a common language”
- Learn English – What’s the origin of the saying “know your onions”
- Learn English – Origin of the saying ‘all wet’
- Learn English – the origin of the phrase “gathering wool”
Best Answer
This saying originated from a Middle English saying, round about 1545 A.D.
In 1614 A.D., this was refined to become:
And later in 1754A.D., it was phrased in today's recognizable English:
Thus is the origin of this saying.
These sayings were taken out of these books.
If you do not wish to browse through all those books for these few phrases, try this site