Street fountain in Sion, Switzerland

• belt and braces
• born and bred
• fast and furious
• hale and hearty
• to have and to hold
• house and home
• part and parcel
• pot and pans
• prim and proper
• rock and roll
• safe and sound
• tried and trusted
• vim and vigour

All the above pairs of words use alliteration: i.e. both words in each pair start with the same letter. Such alliterative word pairs have been used for hundreds of years for poetical, and even magical, effect. The pairs of words continue in use even after individual words have fallen out of use or changed their meaning.

Wholeness

I want to zoom in on two of the above expressions:

• safe and sound
• hale and hearty

All four of the words here suggest health and wholeness, two ideas that have always been linked. 'Hale' was Old English for 'whole', and still means this in some dialects. 'Hale' is related to 'hail', which we think of today as just an old-fashioned greeting. But it meant 'Be well' or 'Good health'. This was the typical Roman greeting, which in Latin was 'Salve'. This in turn gives us 'salvation', which is about being healed and made whole. 'Safe' comes from the same Latin root and originally meant 'whole' or 'unharmed'. In modern German, 'salvation' is 'das Heil'.

So much for 'safe' and 'hale'. The other two words, 'sound' and 'hearty', here have the sense in which they can be used to describe timber. Again, they mean whole, undamaged and strong. 'Sound' is related to the German word 'gesund', which means 'healthy'.

So, the two expressions mean essentially the same. However, they have evolved a subtle difference in meaning. I could speak about my grandmother as being 87 years old but still hale and hearty. I would never decribe my 87-year-old grandmother as being still safe and sound.

Evolution of an Expression

'Safe and sound' is a very old expression. It was used by Shakespeare and in the King James Bible. Its use in the Bible is interesting. The word pair was used once only (Luke 15:27) and it was used to translate a single Greek word. This suggests that the translators, at the beginning of the 17th century, felt the pair of words was already established with a sense that was different from either of the individual words. The sense in this instance was definitely 'healthy and unharmed'.

The word 'safe' today means 'not exposed to risks'. It means more than being unharmed. It includes the idea of being free from future harm. The expression 'safe and sound' is still used more often to mean 'whole and unharmed' but the risk-avoidance meaning is creeping in. The Message is a modern free translation of the Bible. It uses the phrase 'safe and sound' 17 times. Most of these instances have the historic meaning but some of them embody the idea of keeping free from future harm. These days, it seems, we are more interested in being risk-free than in wholeness.