The word was first used this way by the Benedictine abbot and scholar Aelfric in his Lives of Saints, and this is what the word still means today in its literal sense.īut a figurative usage emerged in the 1300s. disabled in the foot or leg, so as to walk haltingly or be unable to walk.” The OED defines this later meaning as “disabled through injury to, or defect in, a limb spec. This meaning is now considered obsolete, but a similar sense developed around the year 1000. When “lame” first came into English, the OED says, it meant “disabled or impaired in any way weak, infirm paralysed unable to move.” And there’s a connection with Old Church Slavonic, in which lomiti meant to break. The word “lame,” which is extremely old, was written as lama or loma when it was first recorded in Old English in the year 725.Īs for its ancestry, the Oxford English Dictionary notes that there were corresponding words in Old Frisian, Old Saxon, Old High and Middle High German, and Old Norse. We certainly didn’t intend to be insensitive when we used the word in Origins of the Specious, our book about language myths. (We called a false etymology of the name Fiat “pretty lame”).īut we’re glad you brought this up, since it gives us a chance to examine the word more closely. Is the use of “lame” in a figurative sense (as in “a lame argument” or “a lame excuse”) insensitive or politically incorrect? But perhaps it has nothing to do with actually being disabled.Ī: You raise an interesting question. Q: I’m surprised that you use the word “lame” in Origins of the Specious to mean bad. I taught a student with cerebral palsy and this use of “lame” seems insensitive to me.

Pretty lame meaning