Nowadays we talk about Santa’s two lists; the Naughty and the Nice. But it hasn’t always been that way. It’s not easy to find the clues, but The Truth Is Out There. Let’s start with “naughty.”
“Naughty” comes from naught — no, that’s not quite right; it didn’t really pop up out of nothing. What I mean is that “naughty” comes from “naught,” a word straight out of Old English so long ago nobody really knows how old it is. That makes sense, in a way. Picture life in the British Isles a couple of thousand years ago — they had loads of opportunity to use a word like “naught.” Naught to eat, naught to do but farm, and naught to say but things like this: “Me hyngrede, & ge me nawuht ne sealdun etan.” That’s from King Elfred, and never mind what it means (that is, I’m too lazy to translate it and anyway it’s beside the point). The way “naughty” came from “naught” has to do with a phrase that was used back in the day: “to bring to naught.” It meant to destroy. Whoever’s castle, plan, hopes, or dinner you might bring to naught would naturally take a dim view of you, and so the adjective “naughty” seemed appropriate.
So “naughty” has been available as a word for the whole history of English, but would it have been casually applied to children? I mean, not in the days of Old English, clearly, because there was no need for the two lists back then. Their year’s worth of behavior notwithstanding, they were probably getting naught for Christmas in any case. But even when The Lists became public knowledge (probably around the early 1300s, at least as hinted at in the Chronicles of Robert of Glocester), “naughty” was really pretty extreme, and went far beyond youthful hijinks and misbehavior.
What you might use to categorize kids, though, was something Edmund Spenser mentioned in The Faerie Queene in 1590: “Guyon..Doth ouerthrow the Bowre of blis, And Acrasy defeat.” That’s right, “acrasy,” which is disorderly behavior. At any rate, that’s how Henry John Todd defined it in the dictionary he published in 1818, The title of the dictionary, by the way, deserves to be mentioned: Johnson’s dictionary, edited by the Reverend H. J. Todd: This day were published, part I. and II. handsomely printed in quarto, price one guinea each, to be continued every three months, till… The Reverend Todd probably reasoned that if you could get through the title, you were sure to plop down a guinea to buy the thing, if only to put it on your shelf so your friends could see the massive titles that you were perfectly comfortable with. “Should we try to put one over on Smithers, then?” one would ask, only to hear “Not a bit of it, old bean, you’ve seen the kind of books he reads. I can’t even get through the titles of some of those tomes. With that huge brain of his, it would take him only a moment to see right through any plot we could devise!”
But I digress. “Acrasy” was also a subject of some writing in 1698 that does a good job of narrowing it down to something that’s neither greatly destructive nor really insidious, but just annoying — a good description of the things children can be apt to do: “He was neither presuming or over-bold, nor yet timorous; a little prone to Anger, but never excessive in it, either as to measure or time: which Acrasies, whether you say of the Body or Mind, occasion great Uneasiness.”
So I think we can say that there’s enough evidence that The Lists — or at least one of them — was not originally focused on “naughty”, but really addressed — and was probably titled, although the original texts of Mr. Claus’ Lists have never been made public — “acrasy”.
We seem to be out of time and space, though, so the investigation into the historical companion to the Acrasy List will have to wait for another installment.
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