Mind your language | 26 August 2006

The sort of people who humorously say ‘Eat your heart out’ are also likely to say ‘To die for!’ as if they had just coined either phrase.

‘Eat your heart out’ has adjusted its meaning since the Oxford English Dictionary was redacted — 1893 for the letter E, edited by Henry Bradley. Then the definition was, ‘To suffer from silent grief or vexation’. Now an element of jealousy is added.

The OED quotes Spenser from the 1590s, but there is a celebrated passage in the contemporary Essays of Francis Bacon, warning how bad it is not to have a confidant. Bacon says that Charles the Hardy (whom we call the Bold) would communicate to no one the secrets that troubled him, and this ‘closenesse did impaire, and a little perish his understanding’. Bacon’s source is Commenius (Philippe de Commines), the biographer of Louis XI, whose own ‘closenesse was indeed his Tormentour’. Robert Burton, in The Anatomy of Melancholy, drawing on the same source, says that Louis ‘suspected every man a traitor that came about him’. That is more paranoia than a secret sorrow.

Anyway, old Bacon comes up next with a splendid sentence: ‘The Parable of Pythagoras is darke, but true; Cor ne edito; Eat not the Heart. Certainly, if a Man would give it a hard Phrase, Those that want Frends to open themselves unto, are Canniballs of their owne Hearts.’

The word cannibal was recent when Bacon used it, connected, in English, since the 1550s with the Caribbeans that Columbus met. But the sayings of Pythagoras are indeed cloaked in age and obscurity. I can’t find the text, and I suspect that it isn’t really Pythagoras. It is the sort of thing that was attributed at the Renaissance to Hermes Trismegistus and his chums.