Traditionally Hallowe’en may be a time when the quick and the dead may come into contact, but nowadays that phrase sounds like a reference to the folklore that zombies are slow! What does it really mean? Quick comes from Old English, where it meant “living, alive.” The meaning of speed (compare with the notion of life in our current usage of lively) was in use by about 1300, and has now completely superseded the original meaning. Other than encountering the archaic meaning in archaic English, such as the King James translation of the Bible, there are only a few places we still see remnants of this old definition.
cut to the quick - to injure someone deeply (usually figuratively - and old-fashioned)
quick - the tender part under your fingernails, especially if you chew your nails down to the quick.
quicksand - sand that can move and swallow objects as if it were alive
quicksilver - metallic mercury, which is fluid at room temperature. Archaic in scientific use, but still encountered in its metaphorical sense to describe things that are shifting, changeable, and hard to predict.
The word dead also goes back to Old English, but has kept its meaning ever since. However, it does occur in a few words and phrases that might surprise you.
dead-center - Why is the exact middle of something dead? This comes from lathes and other rotating machinery in which the center point is unmoving and still, as if dead. deadbolt - a kind of lock that uses a solid bolt, rather than one with a spring. You can see again the sense that movement is “living” while anything that doesn’t move by itself is “dead.” (1808)
deadlock - although it was used in 1808 as a synonym of deadbolt, the sense of “complete standstill, stalemate” came first, from about 1779.
deadpan - a method of delivering humor without expression, the dead here is once again the sense of “stillness or lack of vivacity,” while the pan is slang for “face.” It comes from the USA in the early 20th century.
deadline - although the definition “time limit” dates to 1920 in newspaper jargon, it may have been influenced by an earlier quite literal usage from about 1865: a line inside the perimeter of a Confederate prison, at which any prisoner who touched the line was to be shot dead.
undead - this originally meant “not dead,” as its elements would imply. Not until the very end of the nineteenth century did it come to be applied to vampires and such that are not exactly dead, but not exactly alive either.
And just for a bonus, two words from the Old French/Latin root for “dead”…
mortgage - literally “dead pledge,” because the contract “dies” when the debt is paid in full, or when the payments can no longer be made.
amortize - literally “to make dead,” again because of the idea of reaching a permanent end to a contract or ownership.
All these words certainly remind us, just as Hallowe’en itself might do, that “in the midst of life we are in death.”
[Pictures: Adam tills the earth, woodcut by Hans Holbein, 16th century (Image from Wikimedia Commons);
Der Kandelgiesser, woodcut by Jost Amman, 1568 (Image from Yale University Library).]
