The moon has phases, a big construction project can have phases, you might phase in a new lesson plan in school or a new budgeting system in a business, and while that might leave some practitioners unphased, others, disturbed by the changes, would be more correctly described as “fazed.”
“Phase” has a long history, and it’s used in many different ways, but virtually all of the varieties of “phase” are recent. And although the words are often confused, “faze” is a completely different word.
The original meaning of “phase,” which goes back to Old English and before that to Latin, is the Passover holiday. The oldest quotations are in difficult-to-understand Old English, but this one from the early 1400s isn’t too bad: “This is the religioun of Phase; ech alien schal not ete therof.” That meaning nearly disappeared by the late 1600s, but it still appears, rarely, as it did in 1947: “The feast of Phase was originally a domestic celebration.”
It was also in the 1600s that “phase” was first applied to the moon. Isaac Newton knew the word in its lunar sense: “I could also discern the Moon-like phase of Venus.” By the 1700s almost anything could have phases: “…observe what Correspondency of one Phase of Time runs through All…” (1701).
“Phase” can also be a verb, as you can “phase in” or “phase out” anything that’s a gradual change. Although “phase” has been around for a thousand years, it didn’t occur to anyone to use it as a verb until the early 1900s, when it became part of the jargon of electrical engineering. Electrical generators can be “phased” in various directions — in, out, up, and simply “phased” together, or synchronized.
“Phase in” and “phase out” made the jump from electrical engineering in the 1940s, when they were phased in to common use. And after that, the combination of technical and common usage produced all sorts of phasing; “phase lock,” “phase modulation,” “going through a phase,” and so on.
And that brings us to “faze,” which is sometimes mistakenly written as “phase.” To be “fazed” is to be disturbed by something. The word arose in the early 1800s in the US, and it’s not an alternate spelling of “phase.” Instead, it seems to be an alternate spelling of “feeze”, an extremely old word that meant to frighten someone. In the 1600s there was a phrase “I’ll feeze you”, which seems to have meant something close to “I’ll get you for that.” Shakespeare used it in both “Troilus and Cressida” and “Taming of the Shrew:” “Ile pheeze you infaith.” It looks like the word faded from use by the 1700s, only to — somehow — reappear as “faze” in the 1800s.
It could have been people reading Shakespeare, of course, but really it’s a bit of a mystery how “faze” developed out of “feeze” — if that’s even what happened. It doesn’t make sense that “faze” would have come from “phase” at that time; “phase” didn’t have any usage even close to “faze,” and in the 1800s “phase” was still a pretty rare and specialized word. But this kind of puzzle shows up so often in English that nobody is really fazed. Maybe there will be a further phase of the “faze” craze that will dig up the truth about the phrase and we’ll all be amazed.
