What Is The Origin Of (138)?…
Willy-nilly
This week’s phrase is an is an interesting example of what grammarians call a rhyming-compound which is made up of two discrete words which rhyme with each other. What is also interesting about it is that it has two discrete and very different meanings, one of which has now gone out of fashion. When I use willy-nilly I use it to mean something that is haphazard, almost random and which looks as though there is no over-arching plan behind proceedings. An example of its use adverbially in this context is “the children ran around the garden willy-nilly.”
But the original meaning is completely different. It meant whether you liked it or not, that something was obligatory – the only choice you had was Hobson’s choice. For those of us who know our Latin there is a phrase which is superficially similar, nolens volens, which meant willing (from the verb volo) and unwilling (from the verb nolo). That this may the root of our phrase is given some credence by the Old English sentence in Aelfric’s Lives of Saints, dating from around 1000 CE, “forean the we synd synfulle and sceolan beon eadmode, will ne nelle we.”
We are familiar with will-root but the nill-root is a bit unfamiliar to the modern eyes. The word nill which usually preceded one of the personal pronouns came from the Old English word nyllan which itself was a contraction of ne (no) and willan (will). So nill is the opposite of will and the y at the end of each word is a further contraction, this time of the personal pronoun ye. By the time we get to the 16th century will you, nill you was in common parlance and pops up in Shakespeare’s plays. In The Taming of the Shrew (1596) Petruchio is given the line, “And, will you, nill you, I will marry you” while in Hamlet (1609) the first clown says, “if the man go to this water, and drown himself, it is, will he, nill he, he goes.”
The Oxford English Dictionary attributes the first usage of willy-nilly to the start of the 17th century. Up to this point the phrase was used to indicate that the person had no choice in the matter but over the next century or so it began to take on the meaning of being indecisive, akin to shilly-shally which itself is a reduplication of shall I or shall I not. A form of shilly-shally first appeared in William Congreve’s The Way of the World which was published in 1700; “I don’t stand shill I, shall I, then; if I say’t, I’ll do’t.” That the two were considered synonymous is demonstrated by this passage from The Orange Girl by Sir Walter Besant, published in 1898; “Let us have no more shilly shally, willy nilly talk.”
Of course, one of the hallmarks of indecisiveness is operating without a clear sense of direction or plan. It is relatively easy to see how our phrase could develop its more usual modern sense of randomness, without direction or planning or showing a degree of disorganisation. It has come a long way from its original formation and meaning. There are examples of willy-nilly being used adjectivally to describe something like a set of orders but its usual grammatical form in modern parlance is that of an adverb.
Filed under: Culture, History Tagged: Aelfric's Lives of Saints, nolens volens, origin of shilly-shally, origin of willy-nilly, rhyming compound, Sir Walter Besant, Sir William Congreve, The Orange Girl, The Taming of the Shrew
