My wife asked me (she knows I love these out-of-the-blue language questions) where the word parlous was from, and I said confidently that it was a variant of perilous showing the same sound change as parson (< person) and varsity (< university). But then I thought I’d check the OED for details, and was surprised by the order of senses:
1. Of a person or his or her attributes, behaviour, etc.: keen, shrewd, esp. dangerously cunning or clever; mischievous; capable of harming; malicious. Also (in positive sense): extraordinary, excessive, wonderful. Now rare (in later use colloquial or English regional).
c1390 Whon þeos perlous [variant reading parlous] prestes perceyued hire play.
Pistel of Swete Susan (MS Vernon) 531584 O you whose noble harts cannot accord, to be the sclaues to an infamous lord: And knowes not how to mixe with perlous art, the deadly poyson with the Amorus dart.
T. Hudson, translation of G. de S. Du Bartas, Historie of Judith v. 71
[…]1696 Parlous, a kind of made Word, signifying shrewd, notable.
E. Phillips, New World of Words (new edition)
[…]2.a. Perilous, dangerous, precarious; desperate, hazardous, dire. (Now the usual sense.)
c1425 Ful perlous is displese hem or disturbe.J. Lydgate, Troyyes Book (MS Augustus A.iv) ii. 2273 (Middle English Dictionary)
I don’t think I’d run across the ‘dangerously cunning or clever’ sense before. Perilous itself only goes back to c1300 (“He nolde lete for no-þing þene perilouse wei to wende”); both words, of course, are based on peril, from Latin perīculum, which I hadn’t realized was “< an unattested verb only recorded in the compound experīrī to try, make trial of (see expert adj.¹) + ‑culum ‑culum suffix.” AHD has it under per-³ ‘to try, risk’ in the Appendix of Indo-European roots.
Incidentally, a MeFi post alerted me to the existence of the 512KB Club, which says “The internet has become a bloated mess”:
The 512KB Club is a collection of performance-focused web pages from across the Internet. To qualify your website must satisfy both of the following requirements:
It must be an actual site that contains a reasonable amount of information, not just a couple of links on a page (more info here).
Your total UNCOMPRESSED web resources must not exceed 512KB.
I am happy to say that a scan of LH showed the Bytes Total is only 314 kB. No bloat here!
de Vaan follows Schrijver, The Reflexes of PIE Laryngeals in Latin, in linking -periri and periculum to pario, where par- is derived from prevocalic PIE *prH- (“more attractive than the older assumption of an umlaut *pera- > *para-.
I wonder what E Phillips in 1696 meant exactly by “a kind of made Word”? “Derived”, perhaps?
I wonder as well.
Your total UNCOMPRESSED web resources must not exceed 512KB.
Does that include all the adverts with their images and more usually movies? I imagine those might add up to 512KB before any content whatsoever appears. (Thank you for @Hat’s generosity in not trying to generate revenue from the site.)
Does that include all the adverts with their images and more usually movies?
I assume so, but I basically know nothing about this stuff. Perhaps the 512KB Club link will provide answers.
It probably does include the database that powers everything. After all, how else would you measure any site that is dynamically generated? Without the database, there is no content on languagehat.com …
There appear to be three “made” words in the 1696 edition of New World of English Words: baralipton, hocus-pocus, and parlous. The two earlier editions do not have parlous at all, but do have nasicornous and nonprincipiate as such. So I am inclined to believe that Phillips means ‘invented’ or even ‘assembled’, though I am unclear just where he thought parlous came from.
The 512KB result is for only one page, the page that comes up for the URL you ask for. If you follow the link in the box that showed you the 314K result it will list the files it found.
I’m glad you qualified. You provide a good, informative, and tidy website.
And I’ve learned something again…. I didn’t know where parlous comes from, and having come across it only ever in the fixed expression in a parlous state (does anyone actively use the word outside that expression?), I had assumed it meant something like “messy, shaky, shambolic”.
My adblocker does say it has blocked one ad here, but doesn’t tell me what it was. The LibraryThing, the most ad-like thing here that I’m aware of, is not blocked…
Glossographia Anglicana Nova, from 1707 (assembled from various 17th Century dictionaries, but not by Blount — whose Glossographia was a major source for Phillips — as Blount had been dead for thirty years) says that parlous is “a fictitious word.”
does anyone actively use the word outside that expression?
Yes. Although in a lot of the examples, the accompanying noun is tantamount to ‘state’, such as ‘situation’, ‘circumstances’.
Google nGram claims there’s about double the occurrences of parlous-in-general vs parlous state, with a curious much higher relative blip late 1920’s (Great Depression?) then late 1930’s. Would be interesting to see the incidence over the past few years, but data cutoff is 2020.
Strange that “parlous boy” [Richard III] has a high incidence even in C21st; behind “parlous plight” but ahead of “parlous fear” [Midsummer Night’s Dream] or “parlous days”.
[All the above subject to my misuse of nGrams.]
In 1906, when O. Henry’s Calloway’s Code appeared, “parlous times” was already a journalistic cliché (and thereby, in part, hangs the tale, more Twainish than Henryish.)
@MMcM
Johnson has
“Kicksy-Wicksey. ft. f. [from kick and •wince.] A made word in ridicule and disdain of a wife.”
This is almost 100 years later, but “sssembled” looks OK. From your examples it looks like there is a connotation of whimsical or fanciful construction.
NED v6 pt2 p17 c1 “Made ppl. a.” I. 1. b.
Of a story: Invented, fictitious. Of a word: Invented, ‘coined’. Of an errand: Invented for a pretext. ? Obs. (Cf. made-up.)