4/18/2023 0 Comments Musition meaning![]() So for much of my life I thought that "Fee-fi-fo-fum!" meant something like "Yum-yum-yum-yum!" But it seems instead that the giant disliked the smell. The word also appears in its original nostril-offending sense in the tale of "Jack and the Beanstalk." My impression as a child was that smelling the blood of an Englishman triggered a kind of Pavlovian drool effect in the giant-after all, he wanted to eat Jack (or at least Jack's bones, ground into a high-calcium meal). ![]() Nevertheless, it is interesting to see fie bobbing along, in the OED's telling, at the confluence of Old French and Old Norse. Here, Lear seems to be using both fie and pah (which the OED defines briefly as "A natural exclamation of disgust") to express particular revulsion at the overwhelming stench of "the sulphurous pit"-and soon enough, of his own mortal hand.Īs a child of post–Chuck Jones America, I always imagined that the sound instinctively made on perceiving a disagreeable smell was pew! (from the French le pew. Here wipe it first, it smells of mortalitie. There's hell, there's darkenes, there is the sulphurous pit burning, scalding, stench, consumption: Fye, fie, fie pah, pah: Giue me an Ounce of Ciuet good Apothecary sweeten my immagination: There's money for thee. Lear.The Fitchew, nor the soyled Horse goes too't with a more rioutous appetite: Downe from the waste they are Centaures, though Women all aboue: but to the Girdle do the Gods inherit, beneath is all the Fiends. Kyng! in þe deuyllis name, we! Fye upon hym, dastard!/ What! wenys þat wode warlowe ouere-wyn vs þus lightly?/ A begger of Bedlem, borne as a bastard,/ Nowe by Lucifer lath I þat ladde, I leue hym not lightly.īut there are other instances where fie seems still to be tied to the notion of reaction to bad smells, as in King Lear, act 4, scene 6: The earliest instance of "fie on X" that the OED cites is from the York Plays: The Plays Performed by the Crafts Or Mysteries of York on the Day of Corpus Christi (1440 ): ![]() No longer current in dignified language said to children to excite shame for some unbecoming action, and hence often used to express the humorous pretence of feeling 'shocked'. ![]() An exclamation expressing, in early use, disgust or indignant reproach. Here is the entry for that form of fie in The Compact Edition Oxford English Dictionary (1971):įie int. According to the OED, fie in the sense of "Fie on you" is not a verb or a noun, but an interjection. ![]()
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