Although it makes no sense to say that a kitchen is spick or that a cupboard is span, everyone knows what it means for either of these to be spick and span. This expression has changed greatly over the last seven hundred years. It first appeared in the mid seventeenth century as a shortened form of spick and span new, an expression dating back to the late sixteenth century. This expression in turn was an elaboration of the even older span-new, first recorded in the fourteenth century, which was derived from the Old Norse span-nyr. In Old Norse, span meant a chip of wood, and thus the expression span-nyr literally meant as new as a chip of wood, a new wood chip being moist, clean, and fragrant. The spick was later added to the English translation of span-nyr thanks to the influence of the Dutch idiom spiksplinter nieuw, the spiksplinter part of the expression meaning nail splinter. The upshot of all this is that spick and span new is an English expression, derived from Dutch and Norse, that literally means nail and chip new. Incidentally, the Dutch spik that is represented in spick and span is the source of the English word spike; less obvious, perhaps, is that the Old Norse span derives from the same Germanic source as the English spoon: in fact, for six hundred years after its first appearance in the early eighth century, the word spoon denoted only a chip of wood. It was not until the early fourteenth century that spoon came to mean eating utensil, an inevitable development considering that the first spoons were indeed mere wood chips.<\/p>\n
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Although it makes no sense to say that a kitchen is spick or that a cupboard is span, everyone knows what it means for either of these to be spick and span. This expression has changed greatly over the last seven hundred years. It first appeared in the mid seventeenth century as a shortened form […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-s"],"yoast_head":"\n