The phrase appears with this meaning in the mid-1500s. The latter phrase also refers to being stuck between two undesirable (and dangerous) options. Veronica Stracqualursi, Adam Kelsey, and Ali Rogin,, 23 June 2017īetween the devil and the deep blue sea has an echo in the phrase between Scylla and Charybdis. We still use threshold with that broader "boundary, limit" sense today:Īs members left a meeting about the bill, many said they were encouraged by their first impressions of the text but were hesitant to say if it would clear the 50 vote threshold for passage. But the earliest uses of threshold refer to a different type of boundary: an Old English translation of Boethius's De Consolatione Philosophiae uses the word in a sentence about how the sea was made so that it didn't overstep the "threshold," or boundary, of the earth. The threshold of a door is actually the horizontal floor piece that you walk over whenever you move through a doorway, and this is one of the uses we give it today. But there's nothing in the historical record that directly ties threshing to the threshold. Its Old English ancestor threscwald or threscwold is cousin to the verb that gave us thresh, and this verb in turn refers to separating grain from chaff by beating it with something (like a stick or a flail). Threshold is an old word, dating back over 1,000 years in English, and its origins are slightly obscured. Whenever you leave your house, walk from one room to another, or enter a building, you are crossing a threshold. One of the most common in-betweens we encounter every day is the threshold. Though some claim that in between is redundant, we have evidence of it going back to at least the 1500s, if not earlier-one of our early uses notes that "The Sea brake in between Wisbich, and Walsockenne." The collocation was so common, in fact, that it eventually gave rise to the hyphenated in-between, a noun that refers to an intermediary. It was also used to express reciprocal action by two people towards each other. Twēonum is related to twā, the Old English word that gave us "two" it's the dative plural form of an old distributive numeral that might be best translated as "two each." You'd expect that be- would mean "in," but it doesn't: betwēonum is literally "near two each." In its earliest uses, it wasn't always in reference to the intermediary position of two places, things, or people. The Old English word that eventually became between is actually made up of two parts: the prefix be- and the word twēonum. After all, between refers to that space in the middle, right? When we say that someone or something is in between two other people or things, we mentally place them in the middle, with something on either side.
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