After an entire weekend spent scouring every niche and cranny in your flat , you might discover the place asspick - and - span : so gleamingly clean it seems new . In fact , the full phrase actually isspick and span fresh — though unless you ’re anetymologist , that may not slough any light on where the term really come from .
Before we hadspick and span new , we hadspan - unexampled , a word dating at least as far back as the early 1300s . concord to theOxford English Dictionary , it gain from the Old Norse termspán - nýr , withnýrmeaningnew , andspánmeaningchip(as inwood chip ) . fundamentally , as Pascal Tréguer explained on hisword histories blog , span - newmeant “ as new as a freshly cut wooden microchip . ”
Spick , meanwhile , is believed to come from a number ofold wordsthat all meannail — words also thought to be come to tospike . There ’s the Middle Swedishspijk , the Dutchspijker , and the Old Norsespik(which more accurately meanssplinter ) , to name a few . In Dutch and Flemish , people used the expressionsspiksplinternieuwandspikspeldernieuwin pretty much the same wayspan - newwas used in English : to describe something so spotless it must have just been made . Such as “ a ship that was freshly built , so with all - novel nails and timbre , ” as Michael Quinion wrote on hisblog World Wide Words .
Somewhere along the way , English speakers combine those phrases withspan - newto createspick and couplet new . Thefirst personto do it in writing ( that we know of ) was Sir Thomas North , whose 1579 translation of Plutarch’sLives of the Noble Grecians and Romansfeatured this line : “ They were all in goodly gilt armours , and braue purplish cassocks apon them , spicke , and spanne new . ”
Eventually , thenewgot shake off . And thefirst personto dothatin writing ( again , that we know of ) was Samuel Pepys , who wrote in a 1665 journal unveiling that his conversancy Lady Batten was “ walking through the dirty lane with new spick - and - span white shoes . ”
Though the musical phrase did originally pertain to things that really were Modern , the definition loose up over fourth dimension . These days , call something “ spick - and - couplet ” does n’t necessarily mean it ’s never been used — just that it looks that way . mark - raw , on the other hired hand , still literally meansnew . But thebrandin question is n’t referring to stores or companies .
