Editor's Corner

Happy Spring!

Today I was looking through my emails at some words of the day I hadn’t looked at yet. What caught my eye was the term lily-handed. I’d never seen nor heard that term before. I wondered if it was anything like lily-livered. Suddenly I found myself reading about livers and bad moods. Here are some things from Phrase Finder about lily-livered. We’ll get to lily-handed later.

What’s the meaning of the phrase ‘Lily-livered’?

Cowardly.

Why would that mean cowardly?

One clue is that our Middle Ages predecessors believed the liver to be in control of our emotions. It was thought to be the organ that created blood and that a poorly functioning liver was the cause of mental or physical weakness. Anyone who was choleric, bilious or irritable was labelled ‘liverish’. There were numerous ‘livery’ conditions:

• liver-hearted, or lily-livered – craven, cowardly
• liver-faced – mean spirited
• liver-lipped – pale and feeble
• liver-sick – suffering from dropsy, or the diseases we now call cirrhosis and hepatitis

By contrast, a robust liver supplying ample blood was thought to create rosy cheeks glowing with ruddy good health. References to ‘ruddy’ meaning ‘healthy’ date from the 14th century.

The second part of the explanation is that the lily was synonymous with whiteness. The White or Madonna Lily seems to have a whiteness that is whiter than other whites and the plant was grown in medieval gardens as a symbol of purity.

In the same way as ‘liver’, ‘lily’ has been used as a prefix in several descriptive terms, in this case describing conditions that exemplify purity or paleness– lily-cheeked, lily-fingered, lily-handed, lily-wristed and so on.

So, putting the two adjectives together we get ‘lily-livered’, that is, ‘having a pale and bloodless liver’.

Of course, I had to find out what the definitions for the lily words were, especially lily-handed. (Definitions from all over the internet.)

• lily-cheeked – white or fair (as a lily)
• lily-fingered
  • positively used: white as a lily, delicately fair
  • negatively used: pale; fragile; weak.
  • used to describe someone doesn’t do any hard labor work
• lily-handed
  • characterized by a delicate and pale-skinned beauty
  • having hands that are white due to lack of outdoor work; unaccustomed to physical labor
  • fastidious and foppish

• lily-wristed
  • lacking courage
  • cowardly

So as beautiful as lilies are, they seem to have earned a little negative “flavor.” Or maybe it’s that hard work has gained more favor? I suspect it is all more of a class-related thing, but I’m not going to go there right now. I’ve done rough-handed work, lily-handed work, and danced in a dumpster: it all has its ups and downs.

Kara Church | Technical Editor, Advisory

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