Mind your language
WHEN a psychologist recently recom- mended that we should drop the word stress because it had lost its meaning, many people applauded her. If I shout at my husband or am tired after work or have one too many gin and tonics, it's all a sign of stress.
It perhaps comes as a surprise, then, to find that stress is a good old English word. The Oxford English Dictionary gives its earliest citation from the year 1303: the Children of Israel 'were yn wyldemes Forty wyntyr, yn hard stress'. As indeed they were.
The new edition of the OED improves on the first edition by citing the doublet strain and stress, and illus- trates it from the only poem (1872) by John Greenleaf Whittier that most people have ever read (or sung): Take from our souls the strain and stress And let our ordered lives confess The beauty of thy peace.
But that was before the psychologists came along.
Dot Wordsworth
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