Word of the day: refrain
When an over-played, clichéd song is played yet again, particularly when it cycles around to the tired refrain, unless you’re with a particularly refrained group of people, someone is sure to utter the refrain “how many times do we have to listen to this tune?”
“Refrain” is not exactly a “contronym” (a word that has two opposite meanings, like “sanction”), but its two meanings are at least quite different. One “refrain” is something repeated several times, from the chorus of a song to some sort of complaint like “are we there yet?” The other “refrain” is restricting or preventing, like “refrain from feeding the animals”. The second one is a verb — or at least it is today. Go back a couple of centuries and the “refrain” that’s a restriction was a noun too, like in this example from 1579: “On the next day when he saw his place was voyde agayne, Of Ionathas he did demaund the cause of his refrayne.”
The repeated phrase version of “refrain” comes from the French word “refrein”, and arrived in English around the 1300s. Its original meaning has to do with repeated sections of music, like a chorus, and also meant the song a kind of bird repeats. By the 1400s, though, “refrain” also meant any sort of repeated phrase, sung, played, or spoken. That’s how Chaucer used it in “Troilus & Criseyde” in 1413: “Euere more allas was his refreyn.” The meaning of this version of “refrain” has remained pretty stable for centuries, and means pretty much the same thing today that it did in Chaucer’s time.
The other version of “refrain” has a different meaning because it’s really a different word. This one comes from Latin and French. Its French predecessor is “refraindre” (to restrain or suppress), and the Latin version is “refreare”, which meant the same thing but had particularly to do with holding back a horse, as in “reining in”. Oddly enough, when this word also entered English around the 1300s, nobody at the time seemed to notice that there were two brand-new words that sounded the same but meant very different things. Or maybe they DID notice, but just refrained from saying anything about it.
