ANOTHER ODD COUPLING

When I first heard the expression “vim and vigor”, I asked, “What is vim?” I had never heard that word used anywhere, and it sounded like a nonsense word to me. Vigor, on the other hand, was a word I knew. I could point to examples of vigor.

Vigor came to English from Latin and implies a certain energy, enthusiasm, or force. It came to mean healthy, as well, which makes sense. You have to be healthy to exhibit a lot of energy or enthusiasm. There is a sense of strength, as well, but primarily of the mind with physical power just sort of trailing in the wake of the effect of mental influence.

Vim may have also come from a Latin root meaning strength (also energy) or it may simply be a made up word which first appeared in English in the 1800s. In any case, vim’s definition is almost exactly that of vigor, so why pair them? Are they meant to be hyperbolic, an overstatement for emphasis? Yes, that it is exactly the reason for linking them with their subtle differences filling out the impact for the overall impression desired.

There are some confused people, however, who have complicated the life of “vim”. They pair it with vinegar, as in “he is full of vim and vinegar.” This is just a mistake, a malapropism, most likely cause by a confusion of “piss and vinegar” or “pep and vinegar”.  Vinegar seems to have become synonymous with vitality in the college slang of the 1920s. This may have contributed to the odd pairing as vitality and vigor would seem to be equals.

By the way, if you are full of “piss and vinegar” you have likely had too much alcohol of a quality more like vinegar than a valued vintage. In other words, you are drunk and behaving outrageously. The other half of the expression does not need to be explained beyond a nod to the usual reaction to the intake of large quantities of liquid.

When I decided to write about vim and vigor, I thought this expression was a holdover from much earlier times. There are, I am told, other pairings in English (unlike these), that come from a time when the occupants of the British Isles did not all speak the same language. Back then, there were language enclaves where a whole settlement of Danish speakers, for instance lived within trading distance from a village of Saxon speakers and both might be encompassed in the jurisdiction of the Latin speaking church.

There were class separations, like the Norman French spoken by the ruling class (outside Scotland) versus the Saxon spoken by their servants.  This made it not uncommon for the servants or vassals to take a word from their liege lord’s French, for example, and pair it with one similar in the local Saxon, German/Dutch, Celtic, Norse or Danish of the working classes, or even potentially to mix in Latin terms learned from the clergy.

This was an effort toward successful communication which I applaud. If I find any of these are still in use, I will share them in a later blog.

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