Still more confusions

The word while has a strong association with time, and yet we are sometimes uncomfortable with expressions like while away a pleasant afternoon. Doubt has crept in, possibly because we are not used to a conjunction being a verb as well.  Stay while I get my hat.  No problem. The verb to while someone meaning ‘to occupy someone in a pleasant or engaging way’ appeared in the early 1600s and disappeared very quickly after that, but not before the transfer had taken place from the person as the object of the verb to time as the object. This sense survived, usually as while away.

 That wretched doubt which crept in in the late 1700s was enough to persuade some people that perhaps wile away was correct, even though the basic meaning of wile as a verb was ‘to trick or delude’ which has very little to do with spending time.  So many people have now adopted this usage that the dictionaries now include wile away as a variant of while away, usually with a hopeless shrug. Well what can you do?

 A more recent confusion is that between stave off and starve off.   There is no way in which starve off makes any sense but starve is a more familiar word than stave and possibly there is some mishearing involved. In its literal sense of ‘to fight someone off using a stave or stick’ this word is now obsolete but it survives in its figurative sense of ‘to ward off some impending danger or threat’.

 Similarly we arrive at raise someone’s shackles because hackles is not so familiar a word. Perhaps we all have very well-behaved dogs these days that never raise the hairs on their necks.  The original hackle or heckle, a word borrowed from Germanic languages, was a tool for combing flax. It is thought that the raised feathers on the neck of some domestic birds resembled the teeth of the hackle tool.  The raised hairs on the neck of a dog were also described as hackles. The raised hairs on the necks of these wolves is a good illustration, If you raised the hackles of a dog you made it scared or angry or both.  Used figuratively, it came to mean irritating a person.  Raising shackles makes no sense whatsoever.

 I am reminded of the story a music teacher told me about trying to teach a class a song that included the phrase weevilly wheat. These children had never encountered a weevil so they simply changed it to wiggly wheat.  The teacher said that it was a King Canute and the waves situation.