What Is The Origin Of (144)?…

A Measure Of Things – Part Nine Bee Stunts Of The Week

What Is The Origin Of (144)?…

Brown as a berry

When I was a youngster I would occasionally hear someone comment that a child was as brown as a berry. By this they meant that the kid had quite a suntan, something that was more admired in those less health conscious times than it is perhaps now. I suppose we should be grateful that the simile didn’t stray into more racist territory but it is one that has always struck me as a bit odd. I’m not an expert on berries but I thought that one of the primary purposes of a berry was to attract potential pollinators like birds who would then eat the fruit and excrete the seeds elsewhere. That’s why berries are bright in colour and so a brown berry doesn’t seem to cut the mustard.

When I started looking into the phrase, the first surprise I had was that it has a long pedigree. A couple of examples can be found in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, written in the 1380s. In the Prologue, when describing the horse which a monk was riding, Chaucer wrote, “his palfrey was as broun as is a berye.” The Cook’s Tale contains the following description of the eponymous narrator; “broun as a berye, a proper short felawe.” The simile was already in use as a descriptor of appearance and it was almost certainly in parlance, whether common or otherwise, well before Chaucer put quill to parchment.

The second surprise relates to the word brown. It is often a mistake to view the past, particularly the mediaeval era, through modern eyes and with modern sensibilities. We live in a technicolour world, full of vibrant colour. But a millennium ago, the world, if not monochromatic, had a limited palette from which to paint. For sure, Mother Nature was as colourful and vibrant as she is now, perhaps more so, but dyes for clothing were prohibitively expensive and well beyond the ordinary purse. Often the only splash of man-made colour that Joe Public saw was on the walls of the local church.

What this meant was that the mediaeval mind was much more sensitive to tone and texture than colour. It is a bit like watching black and white TV rather than colour – the shadows and light take on more importance. This is borne out in the use of brown. In around 1330 a sword was described as being made “of brown steel.” In the context of swords and armour, brown wasn’t used to describe colour per se but rather to indicate that the object has lustre and shine.

The Oxford English Dictionary gives the earliest definition of brown as dusky or dark and words with a similar root in other European languages – brun in Swedish and Old French meaning a dark colour ranging from black to reddish-brown and in High German meaning dark-coloured – bear this out. It is probable that Chaucer was using the simile to indicate that the monk’s horse and the cook’s complexion was shiny and dark but not necessarily brown in colour, as modern usage would suggest.

You may be browned off that I haven’t found a definitive answer. This phrase, which is attributed to military slang, possibly from the Indian army or one of the World Wars although the OED’s first citation is dated 1938, means to be angry or annoyed. Some fifty or so years earlier it was used in a horticultural context to indicate damaged or ruined crops. The Oxford Journal in 1883 when reporting the fruit harvest in Canterbury noted, “fortunately the weather has been damp and cool…because otherwise the remaining fruit would have been browned off and rendered useless.” Perhaps the military slang was a euphemism, drawing attention to the hue of the person in high dudgeon. Brown is a trickier word than it seems.