Foible’s Roots Lie in Fencing

Hello,

With the Olympics all over our TV screens at the moment I reckon it’s time to explore a word sports gave to us – foible.

A foible, in case you don’t know, is defined as a minor weakness of eccentricity in somebody’s character. You might say that you tolerate somebody’s foibles because you love them, for example. I have several foibles, as do most of us I suspect – a weakness for etymological mutterings and a fondness for anything remotely related to swashbuckling, for example. I blame Sunday afternoons watching old Errol Flynn movies on TV when I was a child.

Imagine my excitement when, aged 16, it was announced in my school that for something different in Transition Year (a year between junior and senior school, optional in many schools here, but compulsory in mine where students are encouraged to try new subjects and activities) sports class, we would all be learning how to fence. I was pretty much on the fence (pun intended) about school sports as our school played hockey, basketball, and tennis and my hand-eye co-ordination wasn’t good enough for any of them, but fencing, now that I could handle.

My Viking sword (sadly only a letter opener)

When I discovered that the feet positions and posture were similar to ballet, which I’d attempted, and the terms were all in French, which I loved – my mind was made up – fencing was for me.

I’m not sure who came up with the idea to teach fencing to 100 teenage girls, but it was pure genius. Self defense might have been more practical, I’ll admit, but if anybody comes at me with an epee they’re going to be in trouble.

In fencing the foible is the part of a sword blade from the middle to the point (that part of an epee bends to a remarkable degree) and it is this term which ultimately gave us the word foible in the English language. It joined in the mid 1600s, in the sword-related sense, directly from French foible, although these days the word has changed spelling to be faible in French. The idea of the blade being weaker at that point came from an Old French word feble (feeble).

By the 1670s the meaning of foible had extended to describe a weak point of character and it has been with us ever since, perhaps with an added implication of the weakness being somehow charming or excusable, like my fondness for swords and swashbuckling.

Until next time happy reading, writing, swashbuckling, and wordfooling.

Grace (@Wordfoolery)