Sad and sated
Sadness is a blessing,
Sadness is a pearl,
Sadness is my boyfriend
Oh sadness, I'm your girl.
Lykke Li: Sadness is a blessing
A cheery thought for the day, Lykki. The word sad has gone through a spectacular sense evolution since the Old English period, and it is still developing new meanings. One of its most modern senses is ‘pathetically inadequate’ and as such it is weaponised by Donald Trump as the star turn in his monosyllabic armoury to denigrate anything he doesn’t like, or anybody who threatens to puncture his inflated self-regard. This sense dates from around 1900, gaining further traction with the 20th-century coinages of saddo ‘contemptible person, social misfit’ and sad sack, an abbreviated form of sad sack of shit, common in military slang during World War II. From 1942, cartoonist Sergeant George Baker (1915-1975) drew The Sad Sack, a comic strip in U.S. Armed Forces magazine Yank. The cartoon depicted the life of an inept private in the U.S. Army and was praised as being a morale-booster for troops. Such was its popularity that the Army attempted to get soldiers to return to its ranks by using it as the focus of an advertising campaign with the slogan ‘Don’t be a Sad Sack, re-enlist in the Regular Army’ at the end of the war.
The chief modern sense of sad, of course, is ‘unhappy, sorrowful’, but this use didn’t take root until the 1300s, and even then, it took a few hundred years for this to become the principal sense. Old English sæd, from Proto-Germanic *sadaz ‘satiate’ and the Proto-Indo-European mother root *seh₂- ‘satisfy’, meant ‘sated, satisfied, full’, especially in the context of having had your fill of food, drink etc. Germanic cognates retain this meaning: Luxembourgish sat, Dutch zat and German satt all mean ‘sated’ but have also acquired the secondary meanings of ‘drunk’ and ‘fed up’. By the Middle English period, prevailing senses of sad were ‘steadfast’, ‘firmly established, fixed’ and ‘mature, serious’, along with the ‘sated’ sense inherited from Old English sæd. Sad also had more specific physical uses, including ‘vigorous’ for a blow, ‘violent’ for fires, ‘heavy’ for rain, ‘difficult to work’ for soil, ‘sound’ for sleep and ‘dark’ or ‘deep’ for colours and dyes. Sadd colors were the subdued colours chosen for clothing by the English settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony (1628-1691). The people of the colony were devout Puritans who believed that bright hues were frivolous and that they should wear sadd, in the sense of ‘serious’, shades for everyday use. Sadd colors included liver, rust, puce, tawney and russet, along with de Boys ‘wood colour’ from French du bois, gridolin from French gris de lin ‘flax blossom’, a shade of blue, and philly mort, French feuille morte ‘dead leaf’, which was a darkish grey-brown.
Sad as ‘unhappy’ came into its own in the Modern English period, conclusively displacing earlier unrot. This sense development possibly stems from the notion of being ‘full’, leading to a sense of being ‘fed up’ or ‘weary’ of something, causing you to become ‘heavy’ and then ‘melancholy’, or else the ‘serious’ sense led to ‘grave’ and then ‘sorrowful’ – it may well have been a combination of both. Even so, traces of earlier senses of sad can still be found: sadware is a term for ‘heavy pewter goods’, especially plates and dishes that have been hammered into shape; sad pastry is flat and dense, the result of dough that has failed to rise; a sad iron, as opposed to a hollow, box iron was a solid, heavy iron used for getting the creases out of clothes, while the phrase in sad earnest originally mAAeant ‘in all seriousness’, rather than ‘out of sorrowful duty’. Furthermore, when Milton refers to a face settled with ‘sad resolution’ in Paradise Lost, he is describing a purposeful mien, not a Don Quixote-like woeful countenance. Old Norse descendants of *sadaz took up the ‘solidity’ theme (still extant in Swedish satt, which describes people who are ‘stocky’ – short and wide) and this sense survives in a pair of settlements founded (or at least, renamed) by the Vikings: Sadberge, County Durham and Sedbergh, Cumbria – both placenames mean ‘flat, compact hill’.
As sad lost its ‘sated’ and ‘full’ senses, English turned to descendants of Classical Latin satis ‘sufficient, enough’ (like sad ultimately derived from Proto-Indo-European *seh₂-), to borrow words with these associations. These include satiate and satiety ‘the state of being full through having eaten too much’, and saturate < Latin saturare ‘fill, satisfy (with food or drink)’, as well as ‘cause to tire’ and the more familiar ‘drench’. Satisfy derives from Latin satisfacere ‘to satisfy, pay off, make amends’, which is a compound of satis + facere ‘do, make’, literally ‘to do enough’ and hence ‘fulfil the desires of someone’. Surprisingly, asset also comes from this root via Anglo-Norman asez ‘sufficient, enough’ (Modern French assez), which produced the Old French legal phrase aver assetz ‘have sufficient’ (to meet obligations required by law). Assetz was subsequently reinterpreted as a noun meaning ‘sufficient property’ and from here it was a short step to assets appearing on the positive side of balance sheets facing liabilities and in an ideal world, outweighing them. Assets then acquired the senses ‘positive advantages or resources’ and finally ‘sexually attractive parts of the body’. And with that, I feel we’ve reached saturation point and are coming perilously close to a sad state of affairs. J’en ai assez, and I’m sure you have too!