Forsooth Saga
THUS to the 'forsooth' half of Winged Words. In the Eighteenth Century, it emerges, 'forsooth' was not a word in the strictest sense at all, but a not uncommon Christian name for a girl, as Perry's great, great, great aunt, Miss Forsooth Wors- thorne, knew to her cost.
But by the 1790s, it had become an indelible part of the language, meaning, literally, 'the user of this word is a sophisti- cated wit and iconoclast of the first order'. This meaning accounted for its great popu- larity in the first half of the Nineteenth Century, but it was, alas, frequently mis- used, so much so that by 1890 it was employed rarely, and then only for its subsidiary meaning of 'spoon designed especially for the gathering of single straw- berries'. Thus 'Could you please pass me the forsooth,' Mr Josiah Worsthorne, the noted bon-viveur, was reported to have said, as late as 1910.
In our own day, a 'forsooth' is most widely used to mean a leather thong, exclusive to the homosexual community, though Perry's gratuitous reference to such a vile instrument in a family Sunday newspaper seems quite beyond my ken, and symptomatic of the malaise that began at some time during the 1960s.
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