A reader wrote to share the Merriam-Webster Word History of posthaste:
As an adverb, posthaste means “with all possible speed.” It’s found in contemporary writing, but we might think of it as an archaic expression, or at least one that cleverly alludes to days of yore, like on The Simpsons when Mr. Burns, making a rare venture out into the world in his horseless carriage without Smithers, commands to Marge: “You there, fill it up with petroleum distillate, and re-vulcanize my tires, posthaste!” […]
If you didn’t already know the etymology of posthaste, you might see the post at the beginning of the word and assume that it’s functioning as a prefix meaning “after,” the way it does in Latin words like postmortem, or in English words like postgame or postgraduate, or in movements of art or critical theory like postmodernism or post-structuralism.
Not quite. The post in posthaste is the same as in post office: it has to do with the mail. In Middle English, post haste was a noun for the speed with which a person delivering mail was pressed to do their job.
In the 16th century “haste, post, haste” was used to inform couriers (also called posts) that a letter was urgent. Post-haste later came to refer to great promptness and speed for any purpose, and was used in phrases like in post-haste and in all post-haste.
In other words, the work of a courier was so routinely associated with speed and efficiency that it was used as a reference point in the language for others doing speedy labors. The notion caught on so quickly that post-haste was seeing use as an adjective and adverb by the end of the 16th century. […]
The modern U.S. post office was modeled on the post roads in England used to deliver royal mail, with couriers posted at intervals to deliver the mail along the route. The association of courier service with speed and promptness occurs throughout a lot of popular culture, from the character Mr. McFeely from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood (“Speedy Delivery!”) to Mr. ZIP, a character introduced by the U.S. Postal Service to promote the then-new system of ZIP codes.
As delivery methods were upgraded, post-haste as a command carried with it a scent of antiquity, and was used as a signifier of such. Even in the 19th century, it was a go-to word for authors writing scenes set in times past […]
Click through for relevant citations; the OED (entry revised 2006) has the definitions n. “Haste like that of a person travelling post (see post adv.¹); great promptness and speed” (1545 Yf he make Poste haste, bothe he that oweth the horse, and he..that afterwarde shal bye the horse, may chaunce to curse hym. R. Ascham, Toxophilus ii. f. 6), adj. “Prompt, swift; done, sent, etc., with all possible speed” (1594 Post-hast letters came to him..to returne as speedily as he could. T. Nashe, Vnfortunate Traveller sig. I3), and adv. “With the speed of a person travelling post; with all possible haste; immediately” (1597 Olde Iohn of Gaunt..hath sent post haste, To intreate your Maiestie to visite him. W. Shakespeare, Richard II i. iv. 54), and the etymology says:
Apparently originally < post n.³ + haste v. (compare the phrase haste, post, haste, frequently as a delivery instruction on 16th-cent. letters: see quots. 1538, 1547, 1558 in etymological note); in later use the second element was apparently apprehended as haste n.
Thanks, Craig!
Post in haste, repent at leisure.
*tries to think of RePentecost joke, fails*
Somewhere a long time ago I read of the abortive arrival of the second Spanish Armada off Cornwall in 1596. A message was of course sent off, post-haste, from Plymouth to London; it has been preserved in the state archives, with date and time entries showing where and when the messengers frequently changed horses (as they were entitled to do on demand, being on urgent Government business, the owners of the horses to be recompensed later). Riding by night, the first one was doing over 20 miles an hour on the route to Exeter, even over the Haldon hills where the main road was until the 1980s essentially not much unimproved since pre-Roman times: I don’t like to think how he managed the alarmingly steep eastward slope by moonlight. But after Exeter the message with presumably a new rider, slowed down: after Reading , the pace had dropped to a sedate trot. Cornwall, far distant, what’s the hurry? Government work is often like that.
Buy Pentecost futures, repent at cost ?
OT, new French word of the day: “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” = “La case de l’oncle Tom”.
The British gentry could, when they were in a hurry, hire the post horses for their carriages. Their own tired horses would be left to be fed and rested, to be swapped back on the return journey. In Pride and Prejudice, the use of post horses is a signal that a journey has been made in great haste and sparing no expense.
arriving on the scene to try to break up the main characters.
Bingley instantly prevailed on Miss Bennet to avoid the confinement of such an intrusion
That means “with considerable urging”, not “immediately”, right ? I can’t reconstruct why I think that. Unless by association with Latin instans, about which language I know hardly enough to shake a stick at.
ETA: “at the instance of”.
@Stephen: Great story, but how accurate are the time entries? How did they measure time?
Brett, how did they recognize the horses as post horses?
The British gentry could, when they were in a hurry, hire the post horses for their carriages. Their own tired horses would be left to be fed and rested, to be swapped back on the return journey.
К несчастью, Ларины тащились
Боясь прогонов дорогих,
Не на почтовых, на своих
The comparisons of slow traveler’s own horses vs. expensive post horses abound in Pushkin’s verse
@Y: I don’t know. Maybe it was something distinctive about their tack.
You could also hire a post-chaise as an expensive way to travel fast (a bit like using a taxi for a long journey today). See https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Trafalgar_Way._Blue_Anchor_Inn,_Fraddon_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1233038.jpg for an example. £2 17s was a lot of money for just one stage in 1805.
I don’t know how much post horses had to do with the actual post full of letters by the 19th century, or if they were just horses which could be exchanged at certain ‘posts’ along the main roads (which is where the post gets its name, anyway).
By then you could also travel with the mail, in a carriage setting out along a specific route which carried passengers as well as letters – quicker but more expensive than an ordinary stagecoach, but cheaper although less flexible than using your own carriage.
Trond Engen: how did they tell the time in 1596? Well, they had sundials (which obviously do not work at night) but also hour-glasses, known from the fourteenth century, and mechanical clocks. The oldest working clock in England is in Salisbury Cathedral, from 1386: some Continental clocks are older. Also, church bells in towns rang the hours, sometimes the quarter-hours. “Hearing the chimes at midnight” was a commonplace.
Admittedly, clock time was not at first absolutely reliable: but proverbially, two clocks would agree before two philosophers. And until the steam railways made a nationwide mean time essential, each town used its own local time based on the sun at noon. You couldn’t have the up train to London from Plymouth and the down train from London using different clocks. Ireland kept its local time till much later: there is a clock at Larne station with two minute hands, one showing Dublin time and one London.
Which reminds me of the story of the traveller in the west of Ireland complaining to the stationmaster that the clock on the platform and the clock at the entry to the station did not agree. “Ah sure” came the reply “now what would be the point of having two clocks, and they both telling the same time?”
PS
The rate of post horse travel could be affected by Hobson’s Choice.
Though, as I recall, some early mentions have this as “Hudson’s choice.”
The OED entry has recently been revised.
I had previously mentioned somewhere that the choice type origin may have involved early relations with Japan,
perhaps a source for a quote or two later given there.
The OED entry has recently been revised.
So it has (in 2023)! Thanks for the head’s-up; the entry now starts:
And the etymology is:
I, too, wondered what distinguished post horses from other horses. I wondered if the Internet Archive had some period piece that discussed post horses, and a search for that exact phrase (“post horses”) found this:
Shakespeare and the post horses; a new study of The merry wives of Windsor
https://archive.org/details/shakespeareposth0000crof/page/n7/mode/2up
Preface:
Posting scandals! Hm!
I have not yet read the book, though.
The hits on the phrase are surprisingly few (5 – another copy of the same book as above, and a few dry legal texts on the laws and fees and such about post horses). Maybe I need to change the wording?
One fairly obscure sense (a few dictionaries I checked didn’t have it) of the *verb* “post” also involves horses, although I don’t know if it will yield the specific bigram Owlmirror searched for. Explanation here:
https://www.wikihow.com/Post-While-Trotting-on-a-Horse
I don’t know if this verb-sense derives historically/etymology from how riders characteristically rode on post horses in particular or if it’s something entirely independent of that. FWIW, I’m pretty sure I only know this usage because once upon a time, many many decades ago, I had a girlfriend who (like a not-immaterial percentage of the U.S. female population) had gone through a being-really-into-horse-riding phase.
The horses were post (etc)
i think JiE’s given the core of the explanation: they’re horses selected for speed over distance, hired not as single animals but as a series of mounts exchanged regularly to avoid needing pauses to rest them. so “post horses” aren’t so much a type of horse as a riding system (and presumably recognizable by their livery).
…and the most important cathedral often had the right to ring earlier than all other churches in the city.
It’s almost an ontogenetic stage in Western culture.
Yes, and at least since the 70s. I remember the girls in my school having horse stickers on their stuff and reading horse books and comics.
Re “most important cathedral,” when I was a freshman in college (“at university”), a fairly historically-important-in-the-U.S.-context Catholic parish about half a block from my room got a brand new set of fancy and potentially loud bells paid for by donors from across the United States. As I heard the story, they initially threatened to ring them every day at sunrise as was allegedly canonically enjoined but were ultimately prevailed upon to delay the ringing until … maybe 8 a.m. local time? Certainly some time that, if earlier than that, lagged outside dead winter astronomical sunrise and was not inconsistent with the time-to-wake-up-to-go-to-class behavior of the median students, at least.
But then, Roz Chast (The Best American Comics, 2016):
Also, Emma Hunsinger’s How to Draw a Horse, very much on point, is one of the best short stories in comic form I have ever read.
Brett, Y, there are post horses here (all with cool blinders/blinkers):
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/henderson-changing-horses-to-a-post-chaise-outside-the-george-posting-house-t02360
Maybe the point is that post horses, however smartly turned out, were still pretty much standard, whereas horses belonging to the likes of Lady Catherine de Bourgh would have been zhuzhed up to match the carriage?
Thanks, Michael. In the picture (the Tate link isn’t working, but is archived here) the post horses have a monogrammed blanket on (reading “T C”, I think).
@J. W.: American Heritage and Merriam-Webster both list the “post the trot” sense with the “ride fast” sense, though neither definition is very good, as they skip the point, which is to skip a beat. By the way, I was never convinced that it hurt less than sitting the trot or would be easier on the horse. Quite possibly I wasn’t doing it right.
I did read all the Marguerite Henry books, but I don’t think I’d have been a brony.
Also, Emma Hunsinger’s How to Draw a Horse, very much on point, is one of the best short stories in comic form I have ever read.
So I read it. I’m destroyed. It’s ok that you like it, but secretly I like it ten million times more.
Taking just that one thing, how to look at horses and drawings of them. I never had a clue.
Analogy as a non-reductionist technique. That’s why I often use it that way.
Wouldn’t post horses have been branded as such? These were valuable animals and presumably had to be permanently marked to insure they were returned to his/her majesty’s postal service after use. They were also quartered often at inns and the brand would have kept them distinct from the innkeeper’s and guests’ own animals. I doubt people were trusting enough to simply rely on the tack to distinguish them.
As an aside, at least in the modern horse world, “livery” refers to “the boarding and care services provided for horses at a facility, often referred to as a livery yard or livery stable”, not the bridles or decoration a horse wears.
how to look at horses and drawings of them. I never had a clue.
Postillions or post-boys would have gone along with the horses to ride or lead them back, and would have known their own horses. (Although I suppose they would have to be trusted not to vanish with the horses.)
I don’t know – genuinely – whether there would have been particular horses which were government property. The first mail coaches in the UK in the 1780s appear to have been run under contract rather than directly by the post office, and by that time I think the network of posting houses hiring horses to stagecoaches and to private carriages would have been well-established. There obviously are advantages to owning your own horses, but would they be greater than the advantages of contracting someone to supply you with the use of X horses every day, and take on the trouble of substituting for lame horses and replacing dead horses and so on?
And in the days before that of mounted couriers it would presumably be even more difficult for any kind of central organisation to control and replace a supply of horses spread across the whole country.
I’m realising that this actually is something that I want to know more about – I don’t think the official history of the Royal Mail is exactly what I want, but it’s in the library and will presumably be full of references to other books, so if I get hold of it I can report back!
Please do!
this-all has reminded me that i’ve been meaning to reread The Crying of Lot 49, but i don’t think it will provide much insight into the actual history of private vs. public postal horse infrastructure.
Gosh, that book made a big impression on me at 15 or round about. Skimming the WiPe summary now, I remember the plot vaguely and see that I don’t want to read it again. Not because I might be disappointed, but because I already am. I was such a phony back then ! A sucker for printed special effects, allusions and all those teenage nerd come-ons. The only excuse I find now is that there wasn’t much else to do in El Paso.
I can’t understand why so many people want to be young again. Good riddance, I say. So embarrassing ! I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.
Stu: skipping from age 10 to 20 or whatever may seem like a good idea, but it would wreak havoc on all kinds of official documents and other calculations, which would be prone to confusing your true age with the calendar age. Please consider your superfluous years a kind gesture to long-suffering bureaucrats. Relativity is tough.
Well, ok then. That’s good advice. I certainly don’t want to attract the attention of bureaucrats.
I’d have been fine with extending age 10 all the way to age 20, though for completely different reasons.
That’s certain to mess up the actuarial tables.
I don’t care about being young again, but is a normally functioning body too much to ask for?
I have adjusted my criteria for “normally functioning”. That didn’t bring back youth, but at least I am less inclined to mope about its having moved out of town. I never thought about it much before. I simply assumed that we would always be together.
I am looking forward to being old enough that, if I deploy the least physical effort, people will describe me as “spry.”
But it’s all spoiled if they say “surprisingly spry”.
I’m cashing in now, as I related once before. In telephone calls at work, when some young programmer launches his childish arguments in support of some ridiculous idea, I counter and then at soon as possible I carelessly mention something from which it’s clear that I’m wayyy over 70. It gobsmacks them every time, and they back down.
It’s as if they knew all along that they were talking nonsense, as they are accustomed to do with their compeers. By the time they recover their impudence, I’m 3 miles down the road.
I have adjusted my criteria for “normally functioning”.
This is my approach as well.
I was sad to hear that the wonderfully erudite phonetician Ian Maddieson, a truly nice man, had passed last month at 82. He had done his 34th 100-mile race a month before.