Quarterly Report

[Dave Monroe]

Thanks!  Now that I think of it, though, it was this
guy who didn't answer my question about "zombie." 
Will follow up (but if anyone can help me on that one)
...

--- Peter Fellows-McCully <pfm at anam.com> wrote:
> 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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