How am I?
Well, if you really want to know, I’m struggling. No, no, don’t go away.
It’s important not to bury these things. Right now I’m grappling with a last-minute change of heart. This week’s word was going to be banana – I was all geared up for it, had done my research, sampled a few – but then the office manager tried to fine me for saying banana too many times, so I thought, ‘Fine, I’ll change the word to fine then.’
Fine?
Fine.
What’s so interesting about fine? I’ll tell you – absolutely nothing. And that’s why it’s fascinating. Because the way we use the word fine is deliberately designed to be as uninteresting as possible, to deflect attention away from awkward things like anxiety, hardship, illness and haemorrhoids.
Fine is one of the most important words in the English language – so bland and uninformative, yet such an intrinsic part of our culture. It has become the verbal encapsulation of the stiff upper lip.
‘How’s your leg? Is it broken?’
‘No no, it’s fine.’
‘Really? It looks like your foot’s round the wrong way.’
‘Oh, it’ll be fine.’
But here’s the strange thing: normally the English err on the side of understatement; e.g. we’ll describe something wonderful as ‘not bad’. Yet here we are using a word that means ‘of very high quality’ to mean ‘OK’, ‘alright I suppose’, ‘not so bad’, ‘could be worse’, ‘mustn’t grumble’ – all of which actually mean ‘pretty crap actually’.
And has it ever struck you as odd that we use the same word for something that’s very good – as in wine, perfume, clothes etc – as we do for something the office manager slaps you with for saying banana, or Westminster City Council stick on your bike regardless of the fact that the parking restrictions have been lifted in that particular bay at the time due to local building work (not that I’m bitter)?
Let’s go back to our favourite place in history, the Middle Ages, a time when wordsmiths roamed the land transforming base Latin, French, German and Greek into pure English gold. From French they took the word ‘fin’, meaning ‘finish’, stuck an e on the end and moulded two strands of meaning from it.
One strand meant finish as in to put an end to something, to settle, e.g. a debt. This is where we get the word finance, by the way. A fine was a financial obligation that was settled. The other strand meant finish as in complete, perfect, refine. From this evolved the sense of fine as in very high quality.
So, from the same word we get three meanings: ‘of very high quality’, ‘settled’ and ‘the Westminster Council banana thing’.
I would venture, therefore, that the next time you ask me how I am and I say, ‘Fine thanks,’ I’ll genuinely mean I’m settled, alright, not so bad, mustn’t grumble. No understatement, no overstatement… just fine.
Either that or I fancy a banana.
