Idle/Idol/Idyll

         Three homophones, three spellings, three meanings.  Have you ever wondered how these words are different, or whether they’re related?  We’ll start with idle, meaning “lazy or not working or, in the case of an engine, working without accomplishing anything”.  This word comes from Old English, where it meant “empty or worthless,” so it definitely had negative connotations right from the start.  Interestingly, though, the meaning of “not working” seems to have come before the meaning of “lazy,” implying that originally the absence of work was seen as worthless even before it was seen as a deliberate choice.  Anyway, in the Elizabethan English of Shakespeare, there was also a usage meaning “foolish, delirious,” and apparently the phrase idle threats came from that sense: foolish, insane threats, rather than empty threats with no intention of doing anything about it.  I have to say that to my ear I think I get more of the latter connotation, so I wonder how many people still get the “insane” connotation.

        Idol comes via Old French, from Latin idolum meaning “image or form (either mental or physical)”.  In Church Latin idolum was the word used to refer to false gods, images, worshipped by pagans, and when an English word was needed for this concept in the 13th century, we simply took the Latin.  In Middle English the idea of images of false gods gave the word the figurative sense of a person who was false or untrustworthy.  By the mid-sixteenth century that figurative sense had been replaced by the idea of an idol as any object admired excessively, as if it were being worshipped.  It took only a few decades after that for us to see idol meaning a person excessively admired and adored.  Nowadays we are much more likely to see idol as a compliment and something to aspire to, rather than an insult for something or someone false and without true value.

        Idyll is certainly the least common of our three homophones, and the one with which people are generally least familiar.  It means “an extremely happy, peaceful, or picturesque episode or scene; a romantic interlude; or a work of poetry or prose that suggests a pastoral scene of peace and contentment.”  The poetic definition was the first to enter English, around 1600, and it came from Latin idyllium, which was a pastoral poem.  The shift from a poem to the sort of scene or experience described in such a poem is an easy one.  Latin had borrowed its word for the poem from Greek eidyllion which was the same sort of poem but which meant literally “little picture.”  And here’s where we get an interesting connection: the Latin idolum from which English derived idol, was derived from Greek eidolon, which meant “image, form, likeness.”  So yes, idol and idyll ultimately come from the same Greek root meaning “picture.”  Both refer to things that look really good, but might not have the deepest substance.

        As a bonus, around 1800 English also borrowed the Greek eidolon as a synonym for “ghost, apparition,” but its current definitions include not just “specter, phantom,” but many of these same ideas, too: “an idealized person or thing; an unsubstantial image.”  (Previous post here.)  Not to criticize any particular celebrities, but perhaps it’s time we reconsidered the warning that lurks in the roots of these words: rather than allowing lazy thinking to make our choices worthless, we should consider carefully whether any given person or thing, no matter how nice a picture it makes, is really worth our worship.

[Pictures: Little Boy Blue, color woodcut by Francis Donkin Bedford, 1897 (Image from Internet Archive);

The Golden Calf, woodcut for Hans Lufft’s Luther Bible, 1534 (Image from The British Museum);

Are They Thinking About the Grape?, etching and engraving by Jacques Philippe Le Bas after painting by François Boucher, 18th century (Image from The Met).]