I used the expression “pine for it” and the person I was talking to wasn’t familiar with it. I know what it means, of course, but if anybody knows the origin of the expression, throw me a bone and post it in the comments. I have pretty good Google-fu but evidently I haven’t hit on the right search terms yet.
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Marie
| Location: | Lebanon, |
| Activity: | Clothing |
Allow me to Paste and Copy this great Q&A found on takeourword.com/TOW194/page2.html :
From Bill Radding:
‘Tis the season, and my stereo [has been] blaring Christmas carols near continuously. Occasionally, I listen to the words, as I did this morning when I heard, “Long lay the earth in sin and error pining.” One assumes to pine comes from the tree, but how?
(Answer:) There’s the rub: how? We can see no sensible connection between “wasting away” (or, more commonly today, “languishing with intense desire”) and trees. Well, there is the usage of pine to mean “shrink” with regard to wood that has been cut. But that meaning did not arise until the 19th century, and the “wasting away” sense has been around since the late 13th century, and the verb itself (with slightly different meanings) has existed in English since the time of King Alfred the Great! So, whence did it come? It seems that it derives ultimately from the same root as pain, and there are cognates in many of the Germanic languages, as well as some of the Celtic languages. The Indo-European root is *kwei- “to pay, atone, compensate”. New readers, the asterisk indicates that the word is hypothetical, having been back-formed based on the known laws of the development of languages.
Our favorite use of the verb to pine comes from Monty Python’s The Dead Parrot Sketch. “It’s probably pining for the fjords.” Indeed! That particular meaning (“languishing with intense desire”) arose in the 16th century and was first recorded by Shakespeare, in Romeo and Juliet. There! We managed to get Monty Python and Shakespeare into the same paragraph!
That is fabulous. What did you search for to find it? It’s been making me crazy; I actually spent about two hours looking.
Laura wrote: That is fabulous. What did you search for to find it? It’s been making me crazy; I actually spent about two hours looking.
I retraced my steps and this is what I did:
I googled “phrase origin”
I clicked on the 2nd hit (phrases.org.uk) because the phrase itself seemed British to me (had a hunch The Bard had something to do with it) but it turned out to be a bust.
I hit back and scooted down to the 4th hit, “Word and Phrase Origins” (just randomly) and hit paydirt! There was an in-page list of different origin sites. I clicked through each one and placed different variations (to pine, pining for) in the search categories to no avail, but then tje 9th (and last) on the list was the site “Take Our Word For It” (isn’t it always the last place you look?) and they had the explanation above. I spent about 20 minutes looking before I came across it…don’t feel too bad! Lol. Merry Christmas!
Thank you.