by Kevin Burton
I hope you don’t find this a middling effort, but today we bring to you, words about the middle.
This is a list from the Merriam-Webster dictionary, but it reminds me of the late, great Gerry Rafferty. While a member of Stealers Wheel, Rafferty wrote “Stuck In The Middle With You,” which was said to be Paul Simon’s favorite song at the time of its release. That’s endorsement enough for me.
I have always favored the middle of the country (Kansas, Ohio) rather than either coast. I have also favored the quiet middle of the night, rather than the screaming, car-honking daytime.
Now let’s see what the dictionary has to say about the middle:
In-between
When we say that someone or something is in between two other people or things, we mentally place them in the middle, with something on either side. After all, between refers to that space in the middle, right?
It does—but it hasn’t always. The Old English word that eventually became between is actually made up of two parts: the prefix be- and the word twēonum. Twēonum is related to twā, the Old English word that gave us “two”1; it’s the dative plural form of an old distributive numeral that might be best translated as “two each.” You’d expect that be- would mean “in,” but it doesn’t: betwēonum is literally “near two each.”
In its earliest uses, it wasn’t always in reference to the intermediary position of two places, things, or people. It was also used to express reciprocal action by two people towards each other.
Though some claim that in between is redundant, we have evidence of it going back to at least the 1500s, if not earlier—one of our early uses notes that “The Sea brake in between Wisbich, and Walsockenne.” The collocation was so common, in fact, that it eventually gave rise to the hyphenated in-between, a noun that refers to an intermediary.
Threshold
One of the most common in-betweens we encounter every day is the threshold. Whenever you leave your house, walk from one room to another, or enter a building, you are crossing a threshold.
Threshold is an old word, dating back over 1,000 years in English, and its origins are slightly obscured. Its Old English ancestor threscwald or threscwold is cousin to the verb that gave us thresh, and this verb in turn refers to separating grain from chaff by beating it with something (like a stick or a flail). But there’s nothing in the historical record that directly ties threshing to the threshold.
The threshold of a door is actually the horizontal floor piece that you walk over whenever you move through a doorway, and this is one of the uses we give it today. But the earliest uses of threshold refer to a different type of boundary: an Old English translation of Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae uses the word in a sentence about how the sea was made so that it didn’t overstep the “threshold,” or boundary, of the earth. We still use threshold with that broader “boundary, limit” sense today:
Betwixt
Betwixt is now old-fashioned sounding, but it’s a close cousin of between: the –twixt of betwixt traces back to the same root as the -tween of between. Not surprisingly, betwixt means “between.”
It may seem odd that between and betwixt both exist, but in Old and Middle English, these compounds abounded. The Oxford English Dictionary lists between, betwixt, betwixen, betwihen, bitwih and bitweies as variants on this theme, and all related to each other. Most of them passed out of common use by the 1400s, though betwixen though stuck it out until the 1800s and betwixt still survives in limited use.
Betwixt often shows up in the old-fashioned phrase betwixt and between. It means “neither one thing or the other,” and is a prime example of redundancies which settle into established use.
Friday: more words about the middle.
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