Chrysti The Wordsmith: Addlepated - 1

Greetings and welcome to Christie the wordsmith. All of us can remember some particular lexical quirk of an elder. For example the favorite expression of an immigrant grandfather or maybe on so-and-so is fondness for colorful adjectives. I've inherited a lexical curiosity from my maternal grandmother who often used the word addle pated spelled A D D L E P A T E D addle pated is an adjective that means be fuddled confused or muddle headed. Grandma sometimes complained that the heat made her addle pated so did too much noisy activity in the kitchen or having to drive in chaotic town traffic. I've discovered that my grandmother's adjective has a curious history divided into its constituent parts. This is what addle pated really means. The term addle has been with English speakers since the twelve hundreds when as a noun it referred to a mire or a pool of stinking filth. By the fifteen hundreds its use became limited to the expression addle eg a fertilised but rotten egg that never had.

And was in its little sphere a putrid smelly mire. Then by the sixteen hundreds along came the formulation addle pate with pate being a Middle English word forehead addle pate literally means rotten head. So an addle pated person etymologically has a pate full of worthless rotten brains which one assumes would make its owner confused. Indeed addle pated this is Christie the wordsmith good daver before said Christie the wordsmith is sponsored by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Zoot enterprises a high tech firm in Bozeman Montana offering challenging careers and innovative solutions for the financial services industry Web dot com.