Is the phrase “give an account of oneself” a neutral phrase to simplly desctribe one’s actions or activities ?
or
does it imply explianing a transgression of some kind or to defend/justify one’s actions?
To my ear, it implies that you need to explain yourself — either you appear to have done something that requires an explanation or, at the very least, you are in a subordinate position in which you are required to report to a superior. If I simply choose to tell you about my actions/activities because I think they might interest you or you might have something to learn from them, I am not “giving an account of myself”.
Thanks USD. That makes sense.
I swear I’ve read it used to describe performance;
“Gave a good account of themselves.” (Often without a positive outcome.)
or
“Failed to give a good account of themselves.”
Yes. Often in a sports context. Cricket, more specifically, is one I associate it with.
The phrase is biblical, Romans 14:12.
The Law of Liberty
…11It is written: “As surely as I live, says the Lord, every knee will bow before Me; every tongue will confess to God.” 12So then, each of us will give an account of himself to God. 13Therefore let us stop judging one another. Instead, make up your mind not to put any stumbling block or obstacle in your brother’s way.…
That original meaning has been superseded over time to reflect one’s life on earth. Rather than stop judging each other, people now are responsible for giving an account of themselves to others for everything they do.
Sometimes that’s a positive, almost always by giving a good account of themselves as crowmanyclouds stated. However, giving an account can be turned into a negative by tone or context, meaning that one has to justify their actions because they were seen as transgressing in the eyes of others.
I can’t remember encountering it often, but I’d guess that unless it was modified by “good” or something similar I’d read it as a negative and an accusation.
That may be an American thing, or just a small sample size.
Yes, the phrase does have a certain severity to it (at least to my ears). I asked because I couldn’t find any helpful definition for it. Can it be used neutrally vis-à-vis superiors like a teacher or someone in authority without being defensive in some way.
I don’t think that’s the “original meaning”; the Idiom idiom “to give an account of oneself”/“to give account of oneself” meaning to explain how you have discharged your responsibilities or to explain your conduct predates the translation of the scriptures into English. I think the translators of Romans were employing an already-established usage.
That’s interesting. Can you give cites?
The OED has cites going back to c.1300. One of them is Chaucer; apparently the idiom turns up in the Parson’s Tale, which is about 1400.
It occurs to me to check what the Greek text of Rom 14:12 says here. It turns out the word which is translated as “account” is λόγος — speech, discourse, reasoned explanation, which is one of the modern senses of the English word “account”.
Chaucer would certainly be familiar with the Bible. Wycliffe’s full translation appeared in 1382. Only a few books had been translated before that and those seemingly did not include Romans, but the Bible itself was widely circulated in every language, especially Latin. Chaucer studied Latin in school and knew romance languages like French and Italian from his travels, which did translations earlier than English.
Every properly educated person read the Bible in Latin in the 14th century. Putting or alluding to its well-known lines when writing in English would be standard. The Parson’s Tale is a sermon about the seven deadly sins; if I knew nothing else about it my assumption would be that the Bible comes up with fair regularity.
Wycliffe has “shall yield reason to God for himself” in Rom 14:12. And that looks to be from the Vulgate pro se rationem reddet Deo. As far as I can find the first English translation to use “account” here is Tyndale’s Bible of 1534 (" geve accomptes of him selfe to God").
So this is unlikely to be where Chaucer gets the idiom.
But, remember, to give an account of oneself, meaning to give a reasoned explanation of one’s attitudes or actions, is not a figure of speech; it’s a straightforward application of one of the primary senses of the word “account”. (I think it becomes a figure of speech when we apply it to a performance, saying that a sportsman or actor gave a good account of himself.) So once these sense of “account” becomes established, (a) it’s not surprising that Chaucer would use it, and (b) it’s not surprising that someone translating the scriptures into English would use it. There is no reason to suppose that one of them was inspired by the other.
I checked my concise OED, which doesn’t give the Parson’s Tale example. Indeed, it doesn’t appear he used the word at all in any form there, although the OED cites earlier usages of his. The passage reads:
And as seith seint bernard, ther ne shal
No pledynge availle, ne no sleighte; we shullen
Yeven rekenynge of everich ydel word./
Rekenynge - reckoning - is the word he used. Account is given as the equivalent in Modern English translations.
He does attribute it to St. Bernard, not to Romans, so it’s likely true that his source was not the Bible. Even if so, the fact that the term has been used in English translations of Romans for 500 years indicates the strong probability that most users in the last 500 years have been influenced by the biblical phrase rather than Chaucer.
Sorry, I shouldn’t drip-feed this stuff. The full-strength OED has this quotation from The Parson’s tale:
(Hengwrt) (2003) §304 He shal yelde acounte of it at the day of dome.
But I come back to the point I made earlier. This isn’t an idiom that requires an origin-story; it’s a perfectly straightforward application of a long-established sense of the word “account” meaning a reasoned explanation, a coherent story. I don’t see any reason for thinking that “most people were influenced by the biblical phrase rather than Chaucer”; obviously a lot more people would encounter the word in the bible than would encounter it in Chaucer, but that’s true of any word, isn’t it? The word was in common use; why would people be especially influenced by the fact that it was used in the Bible?
I checked concordances and found that the Victorian Studies Hyper-Concordance gave the best results.
“acounte” appears in lines 20042-46
For trust wel, he shal yeven acountes, as seith Seint Bernard, of alle the goodes that han be yeven hym in this present lyf, and how he hath hem despended; in so muche that ther shal nat perisse an heer of his heed, ne a moment of an houre ne: shal nat perisse of his tyme, that he ne shal yeve of it a rekenyng.
That falls after the lines I cited earlier, in lines 19009-11:
And as seith Seint Bernard, “ther ne shal no pledynge availle, ne no sleighte; we shullen yeven rekenynge of everich ydel word.”
I’m not enough of a scholar to know whether these are two ways of saying the same thing, or whether goods and words are being separately weighed.
Language historians often differ over whether to look at the first usage of a term or look at when the term moved from an obscurity to a common part of a language. Chaucer may be the first to use “give an acounte” in this way in English. (“Yeven” is ancestral to “give”, BTW.)
Did the later translators follow his model, or had the phrase been sufficiently ingrained by the 16th century? A scholar needs to be brought in for that too. My feeling, from lots of language study, is that however “give an account of himself” moved into the language, as an everyday saying it came from the Bible.