A Precise History of a Hair’s Breadth Escape
Hello,
Ever had a narrow escape from danger? A moment when your fate hung in the balance and a second either way could have had disastrous consequences? This, by definition, is a hair-breadth escape. Although I always thought it was hair’s breath and didn’t understand how a hair could breathe, but hey, that’s what happens when you always hear a phrase rather than seeing it written down.
The phrase has been with us for some time. Shakespeare uses it in “Othello” and in measurement terms you can be pretty precise about how close a shave you just had – a hair-breadth is defined as the forty-eighth part of an inch.
Annoyingly that measurement concept isn’t accurate. According to a Harvard report I found online, human hair, whose width varies by colour, is more like 1/1500-1/140 of an inch in diameter. Flaxen hair is finest, in case you’re curious, and black hair is thickest but there’s a quite a range even then. Flaxen ranges from 1/1500 to 1/500, for example.
My favourite phrase origin site doesn’t have an entry for the origin of this phrase but I’m guessing that the hair-breadth measurement was the smallest available at the time and hence became an idiom for narrow escapes. However Etymology Online (great site) does have it and dates it to the late 1400s, a bit before “Othello” then. They also provide three variant spellings – hairsbreadth, hairs-breadth, and hair’s breadth – so that made me feel better about my own mistaken spelling.
Now for the component parts of the phrase. Hair was haer in Old English and it came from a Proto Germanic root word hēran which provides similar words in Saxon, Norse, Frisian, Dutch, and German. The spelling in English was influenced by Old Norse har and Old French haire (haircloth). A fascinating side note is that the idea of the hair of the dog that bit you (to drink more booze to cure a hangover) dates back to Pliny (who died in A.D. 79) and reached English in the 1540s.
Breadth (the distance between the sides) joins English in the late 1300s as an evolution of the Old English word braedu (breadth, width) presumably connecting to something being broad. They also had terms for wide and width at the same time and these are more commonly used now.
Until next time, happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,
Grace (@Wordfoolery)
