We see a lot of newfangled gadgets, devices, and tools these days. But there’s nothing new at all about “newfangled”.
“Newfangled” is, if you go back far enough, related to “fang,” but not the modern word for a sharp tooth. The ancestor of the “fangled” part of “newfangled” is an Old English word, “feng,” meaning to capture. You have to go so far back (the 700s) to find the first citation of “feng” that it takes some practice to even read it:
“Hēo him eft hraþe andlēan forgeald
grimman grāpum, ond him tōgēanes fēng”
That’s from “Beowulf”, and it means “She rose quickly and seized him tightly in her grim embrace”. It’s all about Beowulf’s fight with Grendel’s mother.
“New,” of course, is at least as old as “feng,” but it took until the 1200s for the words to be combined to form “newfangel” (Middle English at that point), which even then meant “seized by the new” — that is, fond of novelty.
The OED includes an example of “neufangel” from 1250; it appears in the “Proverbs of Hendyng,” which apparently was a book of moral advice:
“If þi loverd is neufangel,
Ne be þou nout forþi outgangel”
Translated (or, well, it’s English, but anyway) it means “If thy husband is fond of new lovers, don’t therefore be thou fond of going out”.
I’m not sure about the “moral advice” there, but you can see that “neufangel” was in use in relation to something new. The “-ed” started to appear a couple centuries later. John Alcock was an Anglican bishop in the late 1400s, and he included this in one of his sermons:
“Boyes of fyfty yere of age are as newe fangled as ony yonge men be.”
The first example of the use of “newfangled” pretty much as we use it today is from about the same era; a piece written by John Frith:
“Let vs se and examine more of this newfangled philosophye.”
By the way, “fang” by itself didn’t have anything to do with teeth until about the mid 1500s, apparently about the time people started to notice that the canine teeth, particularly when used by actual canines, were good for “seizing” things. Like, um, ankles, for example.
“Fangled” was at one time a word too, and even Shakespeare used it. It appears in “Cymbeline”, which is not exactly one of his top ten. “Fangled” meant “characterized by fopperies” (whimsical or silly ideas), and apparently it appeared because after “newfangled” had been around for a while people simply assumed that if you dropped the “new,” what remained was also a word. It hadn’t been, of course, but this being English, the newfangled “fangle” fit right in. Until, of course, it didn’t — it disappeared about the time “fopperies” became obsolete. That is, the word “fopperies” disappeared; we still have a surplus of inane notions.
