Re: The BARE necessities...

On Fri, 10 Aug 2007 23:52:46 +0200, trio@xxxxxxxxxx (Donna Richoux)
wrote:

Daniel al-Autistiqui <govende30@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


What I want to know is exactly how the phrase "the bare necessities of
life" became a fashionable expression in English.

I wish there was a quick answer, but the history of most two-word
phrases is not documented. It looks like you've made a good start at an
investigation.

Can you go into a little more detail about those "two-word phrases"?
In this particular case, I think the number of words is debatable.
You could arguably say that it is a five-word phrase. Even if you
only count lexical words, there are three.

I remember being surprised to discover that the expression "stranger
in a strange land" predated the famous novel of that name (which I now
know was written by Robert Heinlein). It actually has a Biblical
origin. "Bare necessities (of life)" is another phrase that I found
to be surprisingly old, but I can't seem to track down the origin of
that one.

Not until I started
researching it a few months ago did I realize that it predated the
Disney movie (I guess I had always thought it was a phrase they
concocted to fit into the song). When I was at the library one day, I
tried checking the ultimate resource with regard to the history of the
English language, the Oxford English Dictionary. The best thing they
had there was a quotation under "bare" that was dated 1711 with the
author being one "Addison".

That would be English writer Joseph Addison (1672 - 1719).

Yes, I saw his name in the Biographical Names section of MWCD11.
Later I noticed that the dictionary even lists an adjective
"Addisonian". I don't remember reading about him before, and I
assumed that he was a little-known writer. I suppose you're going to
tell me that he is more famous than Edward FitzGerald or even Omar
Khayyam.

The following Web page apparently
reproduces Addison's text:

http://meta.montclair.edu/spectator/text/may1711/no69.html
Weavers, and the Chinese our Potters. Nature indeed furnishes us with the
bare Necessaries of Life, but Traffick gives us greater Variety of what
is Useful, and at the same time supplies us with every thing that is
Convenient and Ornamental. Nor is it

Note that it's "necessaries", not "necessities".

Good point.

Note also that the "of life" part of the phrase is present in the
Addison quotation.

Unfortunately, the
OED says nothing about when "the bare necessaries of life" became "the
bare necessities of life",

I spent a little while looking for evidence, although not enough to
settle it completely. Google Books shows:

26 on "bare necessaries" date:1800-1810
4 on "bare necessities" date:1800-1810

A hundred years later they were just about even:

614 on "bare necessities" date:1900-1910.
605 on "bare necessaries" date:1900-1910

and recently, "necessities" pulled ahead, although not overwhelmingly:
705 on "bare necessities" date:1997-2007
542 on "bare necessaries" date:1997-2007

Did you try those searches with "bare necessaries/necessities of
life"?

nor does it even indicate clearly that
Addison was the first to use the former expression.

He might have been -- he was quite well known -- and then again he might
not. It would take more research. Are you sure there wasn't any more of
a clue in the OED entry?

He was quite well known? When? As I suggested above, he doesn't seem
to be all that well known anymore.

Anyway, I checked the OED under "bare" and under "necessary" and
"necessity", but apart from the Addison quotation, I couldn't find
anything that had the vaguest resemblance to "bare necessities". (Do
you not have any way of accessing the OED yourself?) I thought that
they might have had "bare necessities" as a compound of "bare" (they
list many two-word phrases of that sort), but there was no such term.


There are a number of smaller dictionaries that use "bare necessities"
to illustrate the meaning of "bare" in question, which suggests that
this usage of "bare" survives in "the bare necessities" but is
otherwise something of an archaism.

Oh, I don't know if it's that archaic; bare truth, bare possibility,
bare facts...

But then we'd have to wonder why, when publishers of dictionaries wish
to illustrate this meaning of "bare" with a phrase, they almost never
say anything but "the bare necessities" (sometimes "the bare
necessities of life"). And besides, I would have been quite rightly
perplexed when we watched _The Jungle Book_ in school and I couldn't
make sense of the "bare [spelled B-A-R-E] necessities" in the song. I
kept thinking of "bear necessities".

daniel mcgrath
--
Daniel Gerard McGrath, a/k/a "Govende":
for e-mail replace "invalid" with "com"

Developmentally disabled;
has Autism (Pervasive Developmental Disorder),
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder,
& periodic bouts of depression.
[This signature is under construction.]

.

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