Mind Your Language | 5 September 2009

Errors stick like burrs. Forty years ago, Jimi Hendrix played ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at Woodstock with a good deal of distortion on his guitar, mostly engendered by feedback. Some people, I learn, refer to this inaccurately as phase distortion. Phase distortion cannot of itself be heard, the physicists tell me.

Phase, again, is identified in many minds with faze. Indeed Phaze is a popular trade name for products in fashion, music and photography. Phaze 1 is an alias of the DJ or musician Rupert Parkes, better known as Photek, though not to me.

The word faze has in reality no connection with phase. Its true relations are resolutely unfashionable, indeed mostly obsolete. Faze, also spelled feaze, is nothing more than a variant of feeze. Faze is first found in print in 1830 in the Western Monthly Review, published in Cincinnati and written by Timothy Flint. In a story about a gang leader by the name of Colonel Plug, who defrauded the gallows by drowning in the Mississippi, Flint uses the sentence: ‘They were too well up to these things to be fazed by a little cold lead.’

If faze bore the meaning ‘discompose’, its progenitor feeze began life meaning ‘drive off’ or ‘frighten away’. That was what it meant in ad 890 in some Anglo-Saxon laws and still in Holinshed’s Chronicles in the 16th century (‘They feazed awaie the Irish’). By then it also meant ‘settle’ you, which is how Shakespeare uses it, to begin The Taming of the Shrew. ‘Ile pheeze you infaith,’ cries Christopher Sly, pitching in medias res. After that, feez hibernated deep in dialect speech until a field linguistician collected an example in Kent in 1887, with the meaning ‘fret’ or ‘worry’.