Friday word: Chivvy
Apr. 24th, 2026 07:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
med_cat posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
1word1dayChivvy [CHIV-ee]
(v.)
- To tell (someone) repeatedly to do something; to nag or harass.
From “chevy” (to chase) used as a hunting cry, from “chevy chase” (a running pursuit) probably from the "Ballad of Chevy Chase," a popular song describing a hunting party on the borderland that turned into a battle between the English and the Scots — 1918
Used in a sentence:
“She chivvies her long-suffering husband with unrelenting insistence to remove the trash, clean the garage, and mow the lawn, such that he lives in perpetual dread of her summons.”
(from The Grandiloquent Word of the Day FB page)
I, of course, immediately thought of this example:
"During my school-days I had been intimately associated with a lad named Percy Phelps, who was of much the same age as myself, though he was two classes ahead of me. He was a very brilliant boy, and carried away every prize which the school had to offer, finished his exploits by winning a scholarship which sent him on to continue his triumphant career at Cambridge.
He was, I remember, extremely well connected, and even when we were all little boys together we knew that his mother’s brother was Lord Holdhurst, the great conservative politician. This gaudy relationship did him little good at school.
On the contrary, it seemed rather a piquant thing to us to chevy him about the playground and hit him over the shins with a wicket."
(poor Percy, I know...)
(Arthur Conan Doyle, "The Naval Treaty")
(v.)
- To tell (someone) repeatedly to do something; to nag or harass.
From “chevy” (to chase) used as a hunting cry, from “chevy chase” (a running pursuit) probably from the "Ballad of Chevy Chase," a popular song describing a hunting party on the borderland that turned into a battle between the English and the Scots — 1918
Used in a sentence:
“She chivvies her long-suffering husband with unrelenting insistence to remove the trash, clean the garage, and mow the lawn, such that he lives in perpetual dread of her summons.”
(from The Grandiloquent Word of the Day FB page)
I, of course, immediately thought of this example:
"During my school-days I had been intimately associated with a lad named Percy Phelps, who was of much the same age as myself, though he was two classes ahead of me. He was a very brilliant boy, and carried away every prize which the school had to offer, finished his exploits by winning a scholarship which sent him on to continue his triumphant career at Cambridge.
He was, I remember, extremely well connected, and even when we were all little boys together we knew that his mother’s brother was Lord Holdhurst, the great conservative politician. This gaudy relationship did him little good at school.
On the contrary, it seemed rather a piquant thing to us to chevy him about the playground and hit him over the shins with a wicket."
(poor Percy, I know...)
(Arthur Conan Doyle, "The Naval Treaty")
