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Is this an odd use of ‘even’?

Q: I’m curious about the use of “even” here: “Bill knows it’s the right thing to do. Even Tom knows it’s the right thing to do.” It seems that “even” suggests our expectations for Tom are lower than for Bill. How does “even” do that?

A: The adverb “even” here indicates a special or exceptional instance of a more typical one. In your examples, “Bill knows it’s the right thing to do” is the typical occurrence, and “Even Tom knows it’s the right thing to do” is the special one.

As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, “even” is used as an adverb “to convey that what is being referred to is an extreme case in comparison with a weaker or more general one which is stated or implied in the adjacent context.”

The earliest OED example of “even” used this way is from The Obedience of a Christen Man (1528), by the Protestant biblical translator and reformer William Tyndale:

 “All secretes knowe they [the Roman Catholic hierarchy], even the very thoughtes of mennes hertes.” Tyndale is apparently referring to secrets heard in the confessional.

(Tyndale’s book is said to have influenced Henry VIII’s decision in 1534 to break with Rome and become the supreme head of the Church of England. Tyndale, arrested in the Netherlands, was executed for heresy in 1536.)

The dictionary’s most recent citation for “even” used in the special sense is from Time Out New York (Jan. 18, 2007): “Even the newest New Yorker knows that the furthest eastern border of Greenwich Village is Fourth Avenue.”

Although English is believed to have inherited “even” from prehistoric Germanic, the OED says, the use of the term for an exceptional occurrence “is not attested in other Germanic languages.”

When “even” was first recorded in Old English it was an adjective, emn, meaning “level, smooth, uniform,” according to the OED. It appears in the dictionary’s first citation as emnum, the dative (or indirect object) form of emn:

“Seo burg wæs getimbred an fildum lande & on swiþe emnum” (“The city was built in a field and on very level ground”). From the Old English Orosius, a late 9th- or early 10th-century translation from the Latin of Paulus Orosius’s Historiarum Adversum Pagano Libri VII (Seven Books of History Against the Pagans).

When the adverb “even” showed up in Old English as efnast, the OED says, it similarly meant “steadily, smoothly; uniformly, regularly.” The first citation is from Psalm 118:77 in the Paris Psalter:

“Me is metegung on modsefan, hu ic æ þine efnast healde” (“For me a modest mind is how I faithfully [i.e., regularly] keep your commandments”).

The adverb still has those senses today, but how did it come to describe something special—in other words, something that’s odd as well as something that’s even?

The OED says the usage is “a natural development” from a now-obsolete Old English use of “even” (spelled efne) to introduce, among other things, “a qualifying circumstance,” with the sense of “namely,” “that is to say,” or “truly.”

The dictionary’s earliest citation is from Guthlac B, an Old English poem about the death of St. Guthlac of Croyland, a hermit in the Anglian Kingdom of Mercia. The poem is based on Vita Sancti Guthlaci (Life of Guthlac), an 8th-century Latin work by Felix of Crowland, an East Anglian monk:

“He fyrngewyrht fyllan sceolde þurh deaðes cyme, domes hleotan, efne þæs ilcan þe ussa yldran fyrn frecne onfengon” (“He must accept his fate to gain glory through the coming of death, even [that is to say] the same fate our parents of old accepted”).

Although the OED traces the use of “even” to introduce an exceptional occurrence to that Old English usage, the dictionary notes that the exceptional sense of the adverb “seems not to have arisen before the 16th cent., and took time to become fully established.”

If you’d like to read more, we wrote posts in 2017 and 2020 that discuss some of the other senses of the word “even.”

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