Q: Your recent post on “late” reminded me of a question I’ve had. In the Nicene creed, we say, “He shall come again with glory to judge both the quick and the dead.” Is “quick” in that sense—living—at all related to the use of “late” in the sense of dead?
A: Our post last month about “late” notes that the word has been used since 1490 to mean dead or recently deceased. That’s a long time.
For much longer, since Old English (spoken from roughly 450 to 1150), “quick” has been used to mean alive.
However, the fact that “late” and “quick” are semi-opposites—and on two different fronts—is mere coincidence.
Both words came into Old English from old Germanic sources, according to OED citations. But originally they weren’t opposites in any sense.
“Quick” originally meant alive or animate. It didn’t come to mean swift or rapid until hundreds of years later.
The Oxford English Dictionary’s first “quick” example is from an Old English translation of the Latin in Historiarum Adversum Paganos Libri Septem (Seven Books of History Against the Pagans), by Paulus Orosius, a Roman historian of the late fourth and early fifth centuries.
Orosius writes that because Adam forsook the good for the bad, God punished humankind and “eac þas eorþan, þe ealle cwice wyhta bi libbað, ealle hiere wæstmbæro gelytlade” (“humbled the earth, with all its living creatures, all its fruitful yield”).
In another Old English example, from the epic poem Beowulf, a fire-spewing dragon burns down Beowulf’s hall and “no ðær aht cwices lað lyftfloga læfan wolde” (“the hateful air flyer would leave no living thing behind”).
Over the years, “quick” has had many meanings related to its original living sense, but most are now obsolete, rare, or regional. One sense that’s still around is in “quicksand,” wet sand that sucks down things on the surface. (Think of it as “living” sand.)
Others are the use of “quick” for the soft tender flesh below the growing part of a fingernail or toenail, and the related expression “cut to the quick” (cause someone deep distress by a hurtful remark or action).
Still another example of the original sense is seen in the verb “quicken” and the adjective “quickening” in reference to the stage of pregnancy when movements of the fetus can be felt.
It wasn’t until the end of the 16th century that “quick” took on its sense of “rapidly moving or occurring,” according to the OED.
The dictionary’s first citation is from the English poet Abraham Fraunce’s 1592 translation of L’Aminta (1573), a play by the Italian poet Torquato Tasso:
“Iapetus is nothing els (saith Proclus) but the most quick motion of heauen.” In Greek mythology, Iapetus was a son of Titan and the father of Prometheus. Proclus was a Greek philosopher.
(Fraunce’s translation is in the Third Part of Countesse Pembrokes Yuychurch. Ivychurch was a home of the countess, his patron.)
As for “late,” it meant slow or tardy when it was first recorded in writing in the late 800s. Six centuries later it came to mean deceased.
In other words, “quick” was late in taking on its meaning of swift. And “late” wasn’t so quick in taking on its sense of dead.
[Note: This post was updated on July 24, 2024.]
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