My eye was caught by a headline in the Daily Telegraph last week that read: “Reclaim the word ‘fit’ and get girls into sport, says schools’ leader.” (It is arguable, incidentally, whether the apostrophe is required after schools. Personally, I think not.) Beneath ran a story about a speech by Helen Fraser, the chief executive of the Girls’ Day School Trust. In it she argued that children should not use the word ‘fit’ to describe attractiveness. Doing so, she said, encouraged an obsession with looks that prevented girls from involving themselves in school sport.
Mrs Fraser went on: “What on earth has happened to the word ‘fit’, which used to mean you could run a few miles without collapsing but now just means ‘fanciable’?”
It is evident that she thinks ‘fit’ in this sense to be a new coinage. I did too. But this is not the case.
Reading Anthony Trollope’s 1883 novel Mr Scarborough’s Family last month I came across the following exchange, which surprised me so much that I transcribed it into a notebook.
Two young diplomats in Brussels are talking about their boss’s niece: “I say that Miss Mountjoy is the fittest girl I have seen for many a day,” says Mr Anderson, and he continues: “Take her altogether, I never saw a girl so fit as Miss Mountjoy.”
Mr Blow asks: “What do you mean when you say that a young lady is fit?”
“I mean that she is right all round, which is a great deal more than can be said of most of them. I never saw anything more tasty than her dress.”
‘Tasty’, too, has an oddly modern ring.
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