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Chris -- 2018-04-11
From an otherwise excellent student essay:
“Creon speaks and acts out of fool hearted pride rather than wisdom.”
I can see how “hearted” makes more sense than “hardy” in this context, and I love it!
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Me too and so do I. The common ‘foolhearty’ variant could suggest either an over-exuberant buffoon or someone stupid to the core:
The heroine is rather dippy and foolhearty.
Historians go to seek the truth of the end of Minos, and adventurers go because they’re adventurers, and because they’re fool hearty, ...
Austria-Hungary’s imperialistic ambitions in a recently-liberated Southeastern Europe were both foolhearty and incredibly dangerous. ...
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I too heart this one. “Fool hearty” is a kind of return-tripper for cold-harded and hardharded. Hardy was first a verb, for harden.
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David Bird wrote:
Hardy was first a verb, for harden.
Huh? When? Foolhardy has always made sense to me starting from the standard adjectival sense of hardy ; i.e. valiant or persistent in the manner of a fool, or as motivated by foolishness. A sort of parallel to pot-sure or pot-valiant. Are you saying such a construal was not original, and that hardy was a verb that got eggcorned into an adjective?
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2024-01-22 08:52:11)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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I seem to be hard of thinking this evening, but I’ll try to get this straight. Here’s what the Online Etymological Dictionary says about the origins of hardy:
early 13c., “bold, daring, fearless,” from O.Fr. hardi, from pp. of hardir “to harden, be or make bold,” from Frankish * hardjan (cf. Goth. gahardjan “make hard”), from W.Gmc. * kharthjan “to make hard.” Sense influenced by English hard. Related: Hardiness.
I guess that means that hardy has always been an adjective/participle, connected to boldness. It is interesting that it is stated that it was influenced by English hard. The O.E. heard came from the same Gmc. root; hardy seems to have come through Fr. from the verb sense “to harden” while hard was O.E. for, well, “hard, the state of hardness, solidity, rigor, cruelty”. I like that you had an understanding of the meaning of the word from the components of foolhardy; I never got the connection to the word hardy, but the explanation you have sounds right.
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