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Month: February 2011

Fie

Fee-fi-fo-fum,
I smell the blood of an Englishman,
Be he alive, or be he dead
I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.[1]

I think about the words around us, sometimes some mental moments pondering someone’s name, like Fletcher. A fletcher would have been the person who makes arrows (from the french word flêche, for arrow ).

Driving home in my car today, I began pondering the word Fie through an almost random rhyming connection with a song on the radio. So perhaps the singer was singing something like “La LA Fly,” and then my brilliant brain started off going “Me, My, Fee, Fie.“  Oh the things that happen when you have nothing else on your mind.

Apparently, Fie, pronounced Faigh or Fai, is a phrase that many languages seem to have used as a mild term of disgust. Though sometimes Fie is/was used while pretending to be shocked.

According to Dictionary.com, the origin is this

1250–1300; Middle English fi  < Middle French  < Latin;  compare Old Norse fÿ, Latin phy.

and hasn’t  changed much since then.

It is a simple F sounding breath noise that you  might make when you accidentally hammer your thumb instead of a nail. A universal sound of disgust.