By the same token

You could have knocked me down with the proverbial feather the other day when on BBC Radio 4 I heard the enjoyably ‘verbal’ Jay Rayner use a phrase I hadn’t heard in yonks:** ‘by the same token’.

The context was a discussion on that entertaining BBC cookery programme The Kitchen Cabinet raised by a certain James about whether truffles are overrated and what other ingredients the panel of experts thought were equally so.

Discussion veered off onto what foods you shouldn’t have to eat if you don’t want to, brussels sprouts being one, with the great retort, ‘How can I make brussels sprouts nice?’ – ‘By not eating them.’

That speaker finished with ‘If you don’t like brussels sprouts, just stay away’, and then Jay rounded off the discussion: ‘And by the same token, James, if you don’t really like truffles, you don’t have to eat them.’

By the same token. What on earth does it mean?

It made my antennae quiver because, in the dim and distant past, before language databases were invented, we harmless drudges had to invent ‘natural-sounding’ examples to put in dictionaries to illustrate how a word or phrase might be used.

More than that: applying for my first job as a lexicographer at Collins back in the eighteenth century, I was sent various tests – by post, believe it or not, or snail mail. One included providing definition and context for twenty idiomatic phrases, one of which was ‘by the same token’.

My definition was ‘for the same reasons and in the same way’, I’m very sure, because I can still remember it: I was pleased with its concision. But I’ve no idea how my made-up example went.

Looking at the Collins Cobuild Dictionary definition just now, I see it reads: ‘You use by the same token to introduce a statement that you think is true for the same reasons that were given for a previous statement.’

That explains its appearance on the Kitchen Cabinet perfectly. The example Cobuild gives reinforces it:

If you give up exercise, your fat increases. By the same token, if you expend more energy you will lose fat.

What surprised me is that Cobuild doesn’t label it ‘formal’, nor does the Oxford online dictionary. Hmmm. Perhaps it’s not formal as such, merely that it’s not often in conversation that one refers back so self-consciously to a preceding statement or argument.

Whatever the truth of the matter, it made me wonder how old the phrase is. It turns out to be a lot older than I would have guessed.

The word token is Old English (as tác(e)n) and related to Modern German Zeichen and Danish tegn. In the OED it first appears in Bede and King Ælfred’s translation of Pastoral Care.

The OED records the phrase first in the Paston Letters in 1463:

And to þis [course] Maister Markham prayed you to agre by þe same token ye meved hym to sette an ende be-twyx you and my maisters your brethren.

Such a long lineage and still going strong!

But my interest was even more piqued because of another idiomatic phrase I was asked in my test to define and contextualise: in the van.

The van we’re talking about here is of course a shortened form of vanguard, and ‘to be in the van’ of something such as a political or artistic movement means to be at the forefront of it, as we would more commonly say. Dutifully, I will have put down my definition and example. They must have worked, because I got the job.

Collins Cobuild doesn’t define the phrase. Which perhaps makes sense because it’s somewhat archaic or precious, I’d say, and not terribly common (Cobuild is systematically based on frequency). Oxford Online gives the definition 1.1. ‘the forefront’, and its first example is ‘he was in the van of the movement to encourage the cultivation of wild flowers.’

Now, archaic, precious, or whatever the phase may be, the Collins test turned out to be a test of how deeply one knew one’s own language, which in effect meant how attentively and widely one had read.

This was brought home to me years later. Riffling through mountains of old files before we consigned them to the great forest in the sky, I found previous failed applicants’ tests.

Among them was: ‘Tell the boys to load it in the van.’

** ‘Yonks’ is very British, I know, but I have to use it. It’s such a great word and one I’ve loved since adolescence – its as well as mine.