Spic and Span Again?

Having chucked out and packed up in January, is everything in your home now spic and span? This expression is not a coupling of two English words. They are both, as a pair, a remnant from the 16^th century. When I looked at the origin of this expression, I thought at once it was odd for a cleansing product to choose this expression for its brand name.

The “span” portion works well enough, since it meant “new”. Something new is usually also clean. So far so good. However, the English word span is also a term for distance or something which covers a distance.

Even this sort of works. If you are talking about something that is fresh and clean, that something will have some surface. You can span a surface (go across) or measure the span of (distance across) a surface. So, the expanse of the something is clear of dirt, clean. However, that leaves “spic” unaccounted for.

But this “spic” is a variant of “spike” and is a reference to wood splinters, as in fresh wood shavings. It is not the slang prejudicial epithet used to insult people assumed to be of a certain nationality. That meaning would truly make a mess of this three-word expression.

Most people are familiar with places that cover their floors with sawdust—in circus tents, some restaurants, and bars, perhaps some agricultural buildings, too. But shavings? Are these not more likely to end up as tinder for a fire or mulch in the garden?

Perhaps homes with dirt floors used shavings as a floor covering. I know they used rushes, other herbs, and grasses for both their fragrance and as insulation. The used ones could be easily swept from the dirt floor and replaced. Thus, making the floor “fresh and clean” again, sort of. It is just as likely, that one layer was simply covered over with a newer, fresher layer.

Perhaps centuries ago, they might have used shavings as stuffing for mattresses. You could undo your soiled mattress, dump the shavings wherever, wash the cover and restuff with new shavings. Voila, fresh and clean mattress. But I doubt this is the association that led us to the interpretation of “fresh and clean”.

Perhaps, after all, it simply referred to the freshness of the cut wood and how cleanly the cut was that made the shaving. It might have been an industry-specific term that drifted into the homes of those workers and into the rest of our lives.

By the way, the language source is Norse with a flavoring of Dutch.

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