Word of the Day - Shrive Shrive • \SHRYVE\ • verb 1 : to administer the sacrament of reconciliation to 2 : to free from guilt Once every three months, Pancho took his savings and drove into Monterey to confess his sins, to do his penance, and be shriven and to get drunk, in the order named. — John Steinbeck, The Pastures of Heaven, 1932 Members of Congress, a generally spineless lot, like nothing better than to be shriven of responsibility for the edicts that come out of Washington. — editorial, The Eagle-Tribune (Andover, Massachusetts), January 30, 2014 We wouldnt want to give the history of shrive short shrift, so heres the whole story. It began when the Latin verb scribere (meaning to write) found its way onto the tongues of certain Germanic peoples who brought it to Britain in the early Middle Ages. Because it was often used for laying down directions or rules in writing, 8th-century Old English speakers used their form of the term, scrīfan, to mean to prescribe or impose. The Church adopted scrīfan to refer to the act of assigning penance to sinners and, later, to hearing confession and administering absolution. Today shrift, the noun form of shrive, makes up half of short shrift, a phrase meaning little or no consideration. Originally, short shrift was the barely adequate time for confession before an execution.
Posted on: Sat, 22 Nov 2014 23:52:57 +0000
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