Quarterly Report

[Peter Fellows-McCully]

The usually authoritative Michael Quinion at

http://www.worldwidewords.org

gives the following:

The idiom is certainly odd. So far as I can understand, it's the result of a
series of shifts in meaning and the growth of various idioms which took
place in the period from late medieval times into the seventeenth century.
In the fourteenth century, quarter added to its basic meaning of the fourth
part of something by taking on a sense of one of the four principal
divisions of the horizon or the dpoints of the compass. It then seems to
have transferred to one of the four quarters of a city, in particular one
occupied by a specific group (as we might still today speak of "the French
quarter"), not literally meaning one fourth of the area, but a rough
direction based on the four main compass points. The same meaning was
applied to one section of an army camp. So quarter came to have attached to
it the idea of an area in which one lived, and further shifts of meaning
seem to have taken place that lead to quarters (in the plural) for one's
living accommodation, especially in military contexts.

There seem to have been one or two further stages. By the 1590s an idiom to
keep good quarters with had grown up, meaning to have good relations with a
person, presumably a reference to the need to stay on good terms with those
living with or around you - Shakespeare used it in The Comedy of Errors in
1590 in a way that showed he was having fun with an expression already well
known. So to give no quarter might have meant "don't show any friendliness
to the enemy". It's possible also that to give quarters could refer to the
need to provide prisoners with a place to stay, so that to give no quarter
was a figurative way of saying "take no prisoners".

It's all a bit obscure from this distance, but the essence of it seems to be
there.



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