Mare's Nest: 07/01/2009

The Ancient Elf

by James Stephens

I am the maker,
The builder, the breaker,
The eagle-winged helper,
The speedy forsaker!

The lance and the lyre,
The water, the fire,
The tooth of oppression,
The lip of desire!

The snare and the wing,
The honey, the sting!
When you seek for me-- look
For a different thing!

I, careless and gay,
Never mean what I say,
For my thoughts and my eyes
Look the opposite way!

.: The Ancient Elf :.

Private Jackson

Parker: [firing machine gun] I'm out of .30 Caliber!

Private Jackson: [lining shots] Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teaches my hands to war, and my fingers to fight.
[fires rifle twice]
Private Jackson: My goodness and my fortress... my high tower and my Deliverer.
[fires rifle]
Private Jackson: My shield, and He in whom I trust
Private Jackson: [fires rifle, then to his rifle]
Private Jackson: Here you go baby.

[fires rifle few more times. Notices a tank has spotted them]

Private Jackson: Parker get down!

[the tank fires at the bell tower killing both Parker and Jackson]

-- Barry Pepper in 'Saving Private Ryan'

The first form was to find a mare’s nest, to imagine that one has found something wonderful that turns out not to be real. It’s first recorded in a play in 1576. A typical usage is in Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands of 1903: “To accept the suggestion we must declare the whole quest a mare’s nest from beginning to end; the attempt on Davies a delusion of his own fancy, the whole structure we had built on it, baseless.”

It’s one variation on a set of phrases that were around centuries ago. Another version was horse’s nest, which was at one time also a dialect term for an idle tale or an oft-told story, one therefore over-elaborated and unbelievable. Other variations that have been recorded include salmon’s nest, and skate’s nest. For some reason, mare’s nest conquered the opposition and became standard. There’s a lovely enlargement of it in the 1811 edition of Captain Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue: “He has found a mare’s nest, and is laughing at the eggs; said of one who laughs without any apparent cause.”

The modern sense wasn’t recorded in the First Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, the entry for which was compiled in 1904, suggesting that it was then uncommon. The untidiness sense began to appear regularly in print only in the 1930s but was common by the 1940s. How the one sense changed into the other isn’t altogether obvious. A progression through illusion to misconception to confusion to muddle to extreme untidiness seems to have occurred. It may be that it was influenced by rat’s nest, a byword for untidiness that’s older than the modern sense of mare’s nest.