Q: As for your post about the use of “around” or “surrounding” instead of “about,” you didn’t mention another option: We can also use “anent.” No, please don’t! Just kidding.
A: Some usage writers consider “anent” archaic, but it isn’t quite as dead as the dodo. In fact, its use has increased a bit in recent years, according to Google’s Ngram Viewer, which tracks usage in digitized books.
In an etymological note, Merriam-Webster says “anent” (which it defines as “about” or “concerning”) has roots in Anglo-Saxon times. It nearly died out by the 17th century, according to the dictionary, but was revived in the 19th century.
“Various usage commentators have decried ‘anent’ as ‘affected’ and ‘archaic,’ ” M-W says. “It is not archaic, however. Although ‘anent’ is rarely found in speech, plenty of examples of current use can be found in written sources. Dead words do occasionally rise from the grave, and ‘anent’ is one of them.”
OK, stuffy little “anent” is still alive, but we wouldn’t recommend using it, except playfully, as W. H. Auden does at the end of this post.
When “anent” first appeared, written in Old English as on efen or on efn (that is, “on even”), it meant “along, in line with; alongside, beside; even or level with,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
We’ve found a dramatic example in Beowulf, an epic poem that may date from as early as 725. In this passage near the end of the work, Beowulf, Lord of the Geats (medieval Geatland is Götaland in modern Sweden), lies dead alongside the body of a dragon he fought:
“dryhten geata, deaðbedde fæst, / wunaðwælreste wyrmes daedumm / him on efn ligeð ealdorgewinna” (“the Lord of the Geats lies fast on his deathbed, brought down by the dragon’s deed. And beside him is stretched out the slayer of men”).
The modern sense of “anent,” which the OED defines as “with reference to, in relation to; regarding, concerning, about,” first appeared in the Middle English of the mid-14th century.
The dictionary’s earliest example (with “anent” spelled “onentes”) is from The Lay Folks’ Catechism (1357), by John Gaytryge: “Wharefore, onentes [with reference to] the first of this sex thinges [these six things] … Thare falles un-to the faithe fourtene poyntes.”
The “anent” spelling showed up a few decades later, according to OED citations. In the dictionary’s earliest example, which we’ve expanded, the term means “with” or “among”:
“Forsothe vnpitouse men seiden, thenkende anent hemselue not riȝt” (“Forsooth, pitiless men, thinking among themselves, but not right”). From the Wycliffe Bible of 1382, Wisdom of Solomon 2:1.
We’ll end with this playful use of “anent” from Auden’s Academic Graffiti (1972), a collection of clerihews, or whimsical four-line poems:
Oxbridge philosophers, to be cursory,
Are products of a middle-class nursery:
Their arguments are anent
What nanny really meant.
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