How come feeling “listless” means you’re lethargic, unwilling to move, or indifferent to just about everything, but on thing it doesn’t mean is “I lost my list”?
“Listless” has been in use since at least the 1400s, when it was included in something called the Promptorium Parvulorum Sive Clericorum. It’s had the same meaning for the past seven centuries, which if nothing else indicates the word has been too listless to shift meanings in the slightest. But in fact “listless” doesn’t really have anything to do with a list. In fact, if you were to make a catalog of all the meanings of “list” that most of us have probably never heard of), “listless” be pretty hard to connect to any of them. Well, except for one…
Back around the year 1000, when Old English was in use, “list” meant hearing. I’d paste a quotation here, but it would be in Old English and too hard to understand (that is, I can’t work out what it means). But you can still hear that old meaning of “list” in the word “listen.” For a while, “list” was also used to mean “ear.” That’s what Chaucer meant in The Canterbury Tales when Wife of Bath says “He smoot me ones on the list.”
Then there’s the “list” that also dates back to Old English, and means “by art or craft”. The oldest quotations of this are also in Old English, but by about 1400 Middle English had arrived and The Seven Sages included “This was a dede of queint list.” Possibly because someone was working behind the scenes with list, that meaning seems to have disappeared by the 1500s.
Old English seems to have experienced a shortage of words that made them assign more meanings to the ones they did have, because in Old English “list” also meant a border. Particularly the kind of border on a piece of cloth, like a hem — but also any sort of border. Richard Hooker’s 1597 book Of the lawes of ecclesiasticall politie: the fift booke includes this passage, which explains it pretty well: “[They] haue thought it better to let them [sc. the books of the Apocrypha] stand as a list or marginall border vnto the olde Testament.”
Remember how “list” meant “ear” in Chaucer? Well for a couple of centuries afterward, “list” was also used to mean specifically the earlobe. “ They haue giuen it me soundly, I feele it vnder the lists of both eares,” wrote Thomas Dekker in his 1631 A tragi-comedy: called, Match mee in London.
Sometime in the 1800s there seems to have been some sort of substance — probably a kind of cloth you might make things out of, say, slippers — that was called “list.” In Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit, “Mr. Casby rose up in his list shoes,” and as recently as 1908 Enoch Arnold Bennet’s Old Wives Tale referred to it as well: “Sophia wore list slippers in the morning.”
Remember how the Bride of Frankenstein had black hair with one prominent streak of white? And remember how haircuts back in the 1960s tended to have very straight, clear parts? Back in the 1800s the “divisions of a head of hair or a beard” were called “lists” too. In fact, any strip of distinguishing color could have been called a “list,” as Sir Philip Sidney used it in The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia in 1590: “His horse was of a firie sorrell, with blacke feete, and blacke list on his back.”
Starting to feel listless yet? I hope not, because we’re not even halfway through the list of “lists.” In fact the only really surprising thing is how many of these meanings of “list” are no longer in the list of “lists” we list as current usage. But I’ll skip to the one we started with. “Listless” is a remnant of the version of “list” that’s really a variation of “lust”, in the sense of “appetite”. Chaucer used this one too, although he tried to distinguish it from ears by spelling it “lest:” “In curteisye was set ful muche hir lest.“ This meaning of “list” seems to have been very common up until about the 19th Century, and that’s the version that still survives inside “listless,” because if you’re feeling “listless” you have no appetite or passion for anything.
The “list” we know today as a series of rows or items is a comparative newcomer; it first appears in this sense in Shakespeare, who used it in both Hamlet and Henry VIII. Its popularity started expanding steadily after that, and nearly all the other meanings of “list” gradually disappeared. By now, gigantic multinational companies (Oracle, for one; SAP, for another) thrive by selling products that are really just fancy ways to make and keep lists. Nearly everybody has their own daily lists, too, whether they’re to-do lists, contacts in their phones, or the groceries you plan to buy. Don’t buy too much, though, if you commute to the market by boat — otherwise you might notice your vessel listing to one side.
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