The people who spoke Old English didn’t have clocks. At least not in the way we think of clocks today, as reliable, consistent devices that tell us precisely what the hour and minute is. Nevertheless, they did understand punctuality. They had a word for it: “seely.” You can even tell that being seely was a valued trait, because “seely” also meant lucky or auspicious. Who knows, maybe if people thought you showed up on time for things, they just assumed you had to be lucky to manage it. Although how exactly they knew you were right on time…well, never mind.
“Seely” had a couple of other meanings as well. It meant innocent or harmless, and it was used particularly if you were harmed or injured in some way that wasn’t at all your fault. George Joye used it when he wrote about the Bible story of Daniel and the lions in 1529: “Sely innocent daniel was casten into the lyons.” In addition to meaning an innocent victim, “seely” could also mean something insignificant. Not so much a person as an occurrence, as in this from 1568: “And not one siely bitte we got since yesterday.”
“Seely” was beginning to disappear by the late 1500s, but another meaning arose around that time that’s connected, in a way, to the way it disappeared. Gervase Babington captured this particular meaning quite plainly in 1583: “ In pride wee speake it, or at least inwardlie thinke it, wee are not as those seelie Idiotes are.” “Seely” in that case meant “foolish.” In fact, you might say “seely” meant “silly” — which is appropriate, because our word “silly” is the word “seely” with a shift in pronunciation from the “ee” sound to the short “i”.
Sure enough, sometime around the 1500s, silly as it may seem, “seely” can be seen to morph into “silly.” But not all the meanings of “seely” came with it when it started to sound silly. “Silly” was used extensively in the 1500s to mean good, and even holy. Possibly an expansion of the “fortunate” connotation of “seely.”
It also kept the “innocent victim” meaning, particularly regarding animals, but pretty quickly came to be the sort of thing you’d say about ANY animal, victim or not. And from there, “silly” began to focus on one particular animal: sheep. Sometimes it isn’t all that clear just what “silly” came to mean when it was applied to sheep. When Francis Quarles wrote, in 1644, “The silly Sheep reposed in their warme fleeces,” what is he really trying to say about those sheep? William Cowper’s 1780 “His silly sheep, what wonder if they stray?” is the same way — today we assume “silly sheep” means “foolish sheep”, but “silly” in those days didn’t exclusively mean “foolish” — that’s a relatively recent development. Likewise, geese are now more likely to be described as “silly” than sheep, but that’s also pretty recent. Maybe the sheep organized and started lobbying.
Even so, “silly,” as well as “seely,” really did also mean foolish — at least starting around the 1600s. But the ancient origins of words can be pretty instructive. Just remember that the next time you realize you’re rushing like crazy to get to to a meeting right on time; you’re just being seely.
