I’m thinking of certain words that are only used in stock phrases, quoting from an old novel, that sort of thing. Ex:
“Thou doth protest too much.”
Is there a word for this phenomenon? Examples in languages other than English?
Is this the phenomenon you’re thinking of? Fossil words.
Things like “fettle” when saying “in fine fettle” or “shrift” in “short shrift” or whatever.
Tit for tat.
Also, a slew of technology terms…your phone rings when you dial it. Your keyboard has a shift key. To save a file, you click the floppy disk icon.
My favorite is, ‘To call a spade a spade’. There are a number of meanings to spade, but most imagine it to be the implement rather than, say, the card.
Actually, it derives from an archaic word for barren, as in unable to conceive. The original — and it’s prolly Jacobean, since they were really in to hearty saltiness back then — was:
To call a Maid a Maid, and a Spade a Spade
differentiating betwixt virginity and sterility.
Five minutes being to little to add: Spade survives in the modern variant, *Spayed *; more usually applied to animals both in word and deed.
What is tat? Cecil tells all.
Hoisted by your own petard.
metes and bounds - one way to describe a piece of land
“Smite”.
“Begat” and “begotten”
Used pretty much exclusively in Biblical quotes or references to them. Or deliberately archaic speech; “Smite evil!”
I’d actually never heard of “fettle” or the associated phrase until now.
“At your beck and call,” sort of, even though I assume the relationship with “beckon” makes “beck” not quite a lost word.
Hail and well met.
Hale and hearty.
Godspeed.
These are also known as skeuomorphs, or a design choice not necessary in the current version but retained to provide a more familiar experience for the user.
Filthy lucre
I’d say “the straight dope” is close to being one at this point. Nowadays we almost never use “dope” in that sense without the “straight.”
Rent in twain.
“Twain” is practically married to two contexts: phrases that mean “cut in two” and the phrase “… and never the twain shall meet.”
The verb “to rend” is a tiny bit more common (and is used in fantasy sometimes), but it’s still pretty fossilized. I’d say that “rent in twain” is probably one of the few places the average person is likely to encounter it.
“Beg” in “To beg the question” means “sidestep.” I don’t think anybody uses it that way anymore, and most people don’t know what they’re saying when they use the expression.
That’s not quite right. “To beg the question” means to assume what you are trying to prove; “question” refers to the resolution being debated (as in "we now take up the question “Is chocolate better than vanilla”). “Beg” in the phrase still makes “to request” - the complete phrase would be better expressed as “To ask that one’s position on the question at hand be accepted from the start”
Well, sorta. The phrase itself is idiomatic, based on a misleading translation. I think from the idiom the verb “beg” picked up the secondary meaning of “sidestep.”
No.