Skip to main content
warren clements

The words deft and daft have been getting a workout of late.

In a letter to The Globe on Jan. 16, Phil Ford discussed Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, who are fighting tooth and nail to be chosen as this year's U.S. Republican presidential candidate. "I can't decide which of these guys is the most daft," he said.

In Britain's Independent on Sunday on Jan. 29, Rupert Cornwell wrote that polls showed two-thirds of voters had a negative view of Gingrich. "Were he a newcomer, a deft campaign might reverse that impression," Cornwell said.

On the CBC-TV show George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight, the eponymous host asked editor and publisher Douglas Gibson to give viewers a few words favoured by the Scots, in honour of Robert Burns Day. Gibson, author of the entertaining new book Stories About Storytellers, said, "It's bad news if people take a scunner to you, and it's really bad news if they call you daft, and really, really bad news if they call you glaikit." (Glaikit, dating from the 1400s, means senseless or foolish.)

It's clear that deft and daft are not synonymous. Deft means skillful. Daft, which may be related to the much later daffy (from the northern English dialect daff, simpleton), means silly or stupid. The first is a compliment and the second is not, unless it's interpreted as a genial salute to one's eccentricity in the way that "you silly dope" can pass for a spousal term of endearment.

Yet daft and deft derive from the same word in Old English, gedaefte, which seems to have had two meanings: mild and gentle, and fit and suitable.

The "ae" in gedaefte, written as a single intertwined character (a diagraph), was a vowel called "ash," from a northern European runic letter that looked like a downcast F. This "ae" is believed to have sounded like the short "a" in cat, capable of producing both the short "a" and "e" in modern English. I must admit that whenever I get near such discussions I break into a cold sweat, fearful of being quizzed on the distinctions between the first vowel shift (around 600, when the Anglo-Saxons invaded Britain) and the Great Vowel Shift (early 1400s).

The general feeling is that daft ( daffte in Middle English) developed from the sense of gedaefte as mild, gentle and meek. The notion of innocence and inoffensiveness grew by the 1500s into one of being simple-minded and foolish.

By contrast, deft ( defte in Middle English) developed from the sense of fitness or suitability, and by the 1400s had its modern meaning of dexterous.

Coincidentally, people have been known to grow pleasantly daft on Valentine's Day, which is less than a fortnight away. Reader James Arthur, responding to a recent column about the philtrum and Cupid's bow (both references to the upper lip), passes along the lovely word limerence. "It appears to be a creation of Dorothy Tennov to describe romantic love," he says.

Tennov, a U.S. psychologist, had a particular interest in the psychological state of someone who is romantically infatuated with another. She coined limerence to describe this state, and wrote in The Observer in 1977 that the word was entirely her own. "I first used the term 'amorance,' then changed it back to 'limerence.' ... It has no roots whatsoever. It looks nice. It works well in French. Take it from me, it has no etymology whatsoever."

So we may rule out a link to limbic, related to a part of the brain concerned with basic emotion. And, alas, we must reject a link to the limerick, even though that verse form is so often about love.

Or must we? A delightful young pair in their prime/ Found each other at just the right time./ Limber limerence led/ To a petal-strewn bed/ And a cordial of lager and lime.

Interact with The Globe