Q: In the phrase “spick and span,” the word “spick” seems to be bound to “span.” It doesn’t stand on its own. Is there a concept for words that are bound to a phrase and meaningless alone?
A: We wrote a post in 2010 (recently updated) about words that are predictably paired with another. For example, “ulterior” is often paired with “motive.” Similar pairs are “bitter + end,” “heated + argument,” “slippery + slope,” and many more.
Sometimes the predictable pairs are joined by a conjunction, as with “flotsam and jetsam,” “rhyme or reason,” “rack and ruin,” “sackcloth and ashes,” “odds and ends,” and so on.
Sir Ernest Gowers, who edited the second edition of Fowlers Modern English Usage (1965), has a term for this latter category—“Siamese twins.” These are words, he says, that “convey a single meaning” when linked by “and” or “or.”
Some twins, Gowers writes, can make sense when separated (like “leaps and bounds”). But some can’t, often because the separate words have become obsolete or dialectal in their original meanings, so they’ve disappeared from common usage. Among the “indivisible” twins, he mentions our old friend “spick and span.”
So the answer to your question is yes: There is a concept for words that are bound in a phrase but meaningless alone. And “spick and span” is a good example. The original meanings of the words have died out but they survive in the phrase. Here’s the story.
The expression “spick and span” (often hyphenated or spelled “spic-and-span”) dates from the early 1600s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. But the tale began centuries before that, most likely with early Scandinavian words for a nail (spik) and a chip of wood (spánn).
In Old Norse, as the OED says, spánnýr meant brand new. It combined the noun spánn (chip of wood) with nýr (new), so literally it meant new as a fresh chip or shaving of wood.
In the late 13th or early 14th century, the Old Norse spánnýr entered English as “span-new,” meaning “quite or perfectly new,” the OED says. It especially referred to new clothes, as in the dictionary’s earliest citation:
“Þe cok bigan of him to rewe, and bouthe him cloþes, al spannewe” (“The cook began to pity him, and bought him clothes, all span-new”). From an anonymous Middle English romance, The Lay of Havelok the Dane, dated from the 1280s to circa 1300.
The noun “spick” came into the expression a few centuries later in the 1500s, Oxford says, when the earlier “span-new” underwent an “emphatic extension” and became “spick and span new.”
In the OED definition, “spick and span new” has a slightly different set of meanings from “span-new.” The notion of cleanliness slips in, and “spick and span new” refers to something “absolutely or perfectly new; brand-new; perfectly fresh or unworn.”
This is the dictionary’s earliest example: “They were all in goodly gilt armours, and braue purple cassocks apon them, spicke, and spanne newe.” From Thomas North’s 1579 translation of a French version of Plutarch’s Lives, written in second-century Greek.
As for the etymology of “spick,” Oxford says it was a noun, a variant of “spike,” which had been around since the mid-1300s when it meant a sharp piece of metal or wood used for fastening. Thus early on it could mean a nail or an especially large nail (the modern sense of “spike”).
Etymologists suggest that “spick” came into Middle English from either the Swedish and Norwegian spik (nail) or from other Germanic sources. But ultimately it came from a prehistoric root that’s been reconstructed as spei– (sharp point), according to The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots.
Interestingly, “spick and span new,” as Oxford notes, is similar in form and meaning to the Flemish and Dutch compound spiksplinternieuw (“spick-splinter-new”). And John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins suggests that the “spick” element in the English expression was added in imitation of the Dutch. The image is roughly “new as a newly forged nail or a fresh splinter of wood.”
Over time, it appears that the “new” element was taken for granted, and by the early 17th century the shortened expression “spick and span” was being used, though the definition did not change. Like “spick and span new,” it first meant “absolutely or perfectly new; brand-new; perfectly fresh or unworn.”
The dictionary’s earliest citation is from the playwright Thomas Tomkis’s comedy Albumazar, first performed in 1614 and published in 1615: “Of a starke Clowne I shall appeare speck and span Gentleman.”
And here’s a later OED example, which we’ve expanded for context, from The Diary of Samuel Pepys (Nov. 15, 1665):
“it was horrible foule weather; and my Lady Batten walking through the dirty lane with new spicke and span white shoes, she dropped one of her galoshes in the dirt, where it stuck, and she forced to go home without one, at which she was horribly vexed.”
Finally, the idea of newness became weaker in the expression, and “spick and span” in the sense we use it today appeared in the mid-19th century. The definition, the OED says, became “particularly neat, trim, or smart; suggestive of something quite new or unaffected by wear.” Here we’ve expanded the dictionary’s earliest example:
“and in front you behold young Benvenuto, spick and span in his very best clothes and silk stockings, looking—as Benvenuto never did in his life.” From comments about a portrait of Benvenuto Cellini in “A Pictorial Rhapsody,” William Makepeace Thackeray’s review of an exhibition at the Royal Academy (Fraser’s Magazine, July 1840).
A late 19th-century example shows just how much notions of neatness and tidiness had replaced newness in the expression. The OED citation is from the Irish novelist Charlotte Ridell’s Daisies and Buttercups (1882): “this spick and span old house.”
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