When ‘Homely’ Is Meant as Compliment
In a recent installment here, I mentioned the word homely . I said it “is one of those words that have two different, almost opposite meanings. On the one hand, it means easygoing, relaxed, natural; on the other, it means coarse, unrefined, ugly.”
Ellen F. Fedde of Claremont shared with me a “homely” adventure that I think is worth spreading further.
She says: “In the Shannon, Ireland, airport I had just given up my seat to a woman some years older than myself. (I am 76.) I swiped a desk chair that was abandoned for the moment and pulled it alongside my new friend.
“ ‘Where’re you from, luv?’ she asked. ‘America,’ said I, but, knowing this always upsets Canadians visiting foreign shores, I added, ‘California’ (which I have found upsets everyone, ‘as if it were a country!’ they accuse me). ‘Oh, you can’t be!’ my new Irish friend exclaimed. ‘Why not?’ I asked. ‘Oh,’ said she, ‘You’re too homely!’ Knowing by her smile she was giving me the nicest compliment she knew, I accepted it but wondered. . . .
“Days later, in the Dublin airport, I was casually talking with an Aer Lingus stewardess. I commented that we used the same words, though with different accents, but what does the Irish word homely mean? She answered with almost the same words you used: Relaxed, kind, friendly. Though I had been almost sure of the Irish meaning, I was glad to hear what I had hoped it meant from a relatively official source. Your article had the only words I had ever seen printed that substantiated my now-Irish understanding.”
I hadn’t realized until now that our American use of homely to mean ugly is virtually unknown in England. Inspired by Fedde’s tale, I pulled out my “Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary,” which comes from Edinburgh, and found “homely, pertaining to home: familiar: plain: unpretentious: ugly (U.S.).”
That “(U.S.)” drove me to further research. I turned to Norman W. Schur’s “English English.” Schur is a retired lawyer and a quite brilliant scholar who has homes in both Connecticut and England. He says, “ Homely is used in Britain to mean ‘simple,’ ‘unpretentious,’ ‘nothing fancy.’ A homely woman in Britain is a friendly, unassuming, domestic type. It is quite possible to be attractive and homely in Britain. Homely , applied to the atmosphere of a place, comes close to the German gemutlich . Homely , in America, is uncomplimentary and means not good looking or even ugly . One wonders about the social implications of the evolution in America of the adjective homely from the proud noun home . See plain for the American sense of homely .”
I admire Schur’s work, but it seems to me that he is implying that the American use of homely to mean ugly might stem from the ugliness of American homes, or, more likely, the ugly brawls and rowdy bouts of drunkenness for which American homes are famous. While no one familiar with popular depictions of life in today’s America would deny that these are staples of the American home, I nevertheless believe that the derivation of homely for ugly is more likely connected, as Schur hints, with the word plain. Chambers says, of plain, “clear . . . simple . . . unembellished,” echoing the homely definitions, then it gets down and dirty with “deficient in beauty: (in meiosis) ugly.”
Meiosis is a figure of speech akin to irony. It is a form of understatement. Describing the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel as “not bad” would be a good example of meiosis. A very common meiotic term of the past 20 years or so is “not chopped liver.” A gorgeous girl strolls the beach in her bikini, male heads swivel like gyroscopes, and somebody whose wit is gleaned from TV talk shows is bound to say, “That ain’t chopped liver.”
Plain and homely may, indeed, be examples of meiosis. But I think it more likely that plain and homely originated as just “nicer ways of putting it.” It was true in my youth, and it’s probably still true, that asking a mutual friend what your prospective blind date looked like never brought forth the opinion that she was ugly. (This goes, of course, for blind dates of either sex.) The description was always along the lines of “You’ll love her!” and “Lots of fun!” “Great personality!”--all of which, true or not, avoided the question.
I’m just guessing, but I think it likely that, in the early days of this nation, if someone wanted to describe a person who couldn’t conceivably be called good-looking, he might have sidestepped and spoken of the person’s good qualities--of his or her homeliness: The person was unadorned, genuine, true-blue--homely. Probably because the word was so often descriptive of physically unattractive people, it came to mean physically unattractive. In my college days, “She’s a darn swell kid and a peachy dancer” was code, meaning she was the dregs of the looks department. As for plain, I think that might have had a similar origin. I remember that the first few times I saw plain used to mean ugly, I didn’t fully understand. It was always in English, as opposed to American, literature, and it always referred to a young woman. I took it to mean unpretentious and not very exciting, but quite presentable and probably very likable. That, I think, was in fact what the word was meant to imply, but the innocent connotation came, in time, to mean ugly .
Plain and homely : two plain, homely words gone to the dogs. And with the best of intentions.