Sunday Word: Woebegone

[sallymn]

woebegone [woh-bi-gawn, -gon]

adjective:
1 beset with woe; affected by woe, especially in appearance
2 showing or indicating woe

Examples:

Those woebegone souls must prostrate themselves in front of judges, begging their honors to declare them complete and total failures. (Ron Lieber, Student Loan Borrowers Don't Deserve 'Forgiveness'. They Deserve an Apology., The New York Times, May 2022)

The run-down, two-story house, located in the woebegone former timber town of Aberdeen near the Olympic National Forest, can be moved into as is or uprooted from its foundations and carted off for display elsewhere, selling agent Edward Fitz said. (Rock hero Kurt Cobain’s childhood home for sale , The Express Tribune, September 2013)

She was so absorbed that she almost fell over the woebegone little figure on the step. (Mary Finley Leonard, The Story of the Big Front Door)

He stood before me the most woebegone, heartbroken man I ever saw. (Sarah Margan Dawson, A Confederate Girl's Diary)

Origin:

c 1300, in expressions such as me is wo bigone 'woe has beset me,' from woe + begon, past participle of Middle English bego 'to beset, surround, overwhelm,' from Old English began 'go over, traverse; inhabit, occupy; encompass, surround'. The verb is now obsolete, and its only survival is the fossilized past participle in this word. (Online Etymology Dictionary)

Woebegone is first recorded in The Romance of Guy of Warwick, of about the year 1300. At that date, people would say things like 'me is woe begon', grief has beset me. Notice the word order, with me as the indirect object of the sentence, but put first. The verb here is bego, which has been obsolete for something like four hundred years, but which in medieval times had a variety of senses, such as to go round, surround or beset.

Over time, the link between woe and begone, the past participle of bego, became so close that they fused into a single adjective, so tightly linked that they survived shifts in language and the loss of the verb bego. For some centuries it retained this sense of 'afflicted by grief', oppressed with misfortune, distress, sorrow or grief. Shakespeare uses it this way in Henry IV:

    Even such a man, so faint, so spiritless,
    So dull, so dread in look, so woe-begone,
    Drew Priam's curtain in the dead of night
    And would have told him half his Troy was burnt.

This quotation in particular was so well known that it contributed to a revival of woebegone in a subtly altered sense at the beginning of the nineteenth century, not meaning somebody actually beset by woes, but somebody whose appearance makes them look as though they are.

We're now a long way from that medieval romance, but in continuing to use the word we retain a small vestige of middle English as a linguistic fossil. Several other archaic forms in woe have also survived, such as 'woe is me'and 'woe betide you', presumably because there's a continuing need for formulaic lamentatory utterances. (World Wide Words)

Comments

[stefanyeah]

I like this word. Need to work on incorporating it into my active language skills. :D

[sallymn]

It's a fun word to use :)

[med_cat]

An excellent word, as always ;)

[sallymn]

It's one that I really like :)