TAWDRY (of all things)

“Tomorrow is the joyful day, Audrey,” says Touchstone the clown, the “motley fool” in As You Like It. He’s going to get married to a girl who herds goats. Not that he’s used to that. Touchstone has lived at court, and he doesn’t care all that much for country ways, though he does get along all right. What’s he doing in the middle of the Forest of Arden, then? That’s easy. He has followed the young ladies Rosalind and her cousin Celia into exile. Rosalind’s father, Duke Senior, is there, while Celia’s father, Duke Frederick, is at court — the younger brother who has sent his elder packing. We get four marriages at the end of As You Like It, my favorite among all of Shakespeare’s pure comedies, and Touchstone and Audrey will make a pair. They go together, says the goddess of marriage, “as winter and rough weather.” She’s a very nice girl, but a bit lacking in the brain department. She doesn’t get any of his jokes. When that happens, says Touchstone, “it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room” — a big bill at the pub, you know, and maybe more than that besides.

But what on earth does the name Audrey have to do with our Word of the Week, tawdry? “They rhyme!” you say. Well, they’d better. Here’s what happened. There was a Northumbrian princess named Aethelthryth — or Etheldreda — who was Christian at a time when the British isles were being evangelized by Irish monks from the north and west, and Frankish priests from the continent. Everybody wrote about her, including Bede the Venerable, a most reliable source for all things English at his time and for one or two centuries before. She had to get married twice for political reasons, against her wishes, and each time she managed to keep intact her desire to devote her life to God as a nun. Eventually she fled her second husband to a swamp-encircled tract of land in Ely, where she had grown up, and there she founded a monastery — Ely Minster, as it came to be known. She was revered as Saint Etheldreda, and the name over time underwent some changes: the soft th between the vowels was lost, and the l before the d merged with the vowel and lengthened it (think of the English name Walt or Walter, becoming Wat or Water, as in the surnames Watt, Watson, Watkins, and Waters; think of the a + l becoming aw, in words like calm and walk). So her name became SAINT AUDREY!

Now then, on June 23, in the year 679, Saint Audrey died of a great tumor on her neck, which she had interpreted as a judgment against her fondness for gaudy necklaces when she was a girl. However that may be, Saint Audrey had become quite beloved for her tireless works of charity, and for many centuries pilgrims would come to Ely on her account. In Shakespeare’s time and before, the people of Ely held a big fair every year, and at the fair you could buy Saint Audrey lace, a colorful silk ribbon you might give to your favorite girl. You needn’t go to Ely to get it. You might buy it from a traveling peddler. That’s what happens in The Winter’s Tale — for my money, the most underrated of all of Shakespeare’s plays, and easily among my top ten. “Come,” says Mopsa, the lively shepherdess to the shepherd swain whom Shakespeare simply gives the title of Clown, “you promised me a tawdry-lace and a pair of sweet gloves.” He’s had his pocket picked — and by that same peddler, no less, though the man was in disguise — but he’s agreeable, and she’ll get that lace.

What happened to the word, to go from Saint Audrey lace to tawdry lace? What’s called faulty separation, that’s what. Suppose people gave you an extra name, like the Bambino (Babe Ruth), or The Iron Horse (Lou Gehrig), or The Wizard (Ozzie Smith). That would be, in Middle English an eke-name, an also-name. Say it fast — an eke-name, an-eke-name, a-neke-name — a nickname! Yes, that’s how we got the word nickname. It had nothing to do with Saint Nick up above, or with Old Nick down below. Same thing happened but in the other direction to Middle English nadder, a snake (think of nether, as in low down). Say it fast — a nadder, a-nadder, an-adder, an adder!

Now then, the tawdry-lace wasn’t an expensive thing, so that when the word tawdry was separated from the lace, it came to mean something cheap and maybe a bit tacky — like a lot of costume jewelry, maybe, or rhinestones, or clip-on polyester neckties. Then the word underwent a slow pejoration, as linguists call it. From the cheap, it went to the vulgar, and from there to the unseemly, the raffish, the low. Words don’t always go in that direction: nice used to mean unpleasantly fussy, picky; and its Latin source means knowing nothing at all! But tawdry did go from good to bad. How very strange: to go from a brave and pure and generous woman, Saint Etheldreda, to lace ribbons at a fair, to cheap material, to the tabloids and their tawdry articles on rich and famous people. As Yogi Berra of happy memory might say, this word came to a couple of forks in the road, and took them.

“Country Fair,” Grandma Moses. Public Domain