An “imp” is a small devil or demon, and in modern usage usually means a small child engaged in some sort of mischief. “Imp” is from Old English, and first appeared in a book from about 900, Pastoral Care:
“Sio halige gesomnung Godes folces, ðæt eardað on æppeltunum, ðonne hie wel begað hira plantan & hiera impan, oð hie fulweaxne beoð.”
(That is the holy congregation of God’s people, which dwells in orchards, when they cultivate well their plants & their imps, until they are full grown.)
By the way, don’t worry about not being able to read it; that’s Old English and a completely different language than we speak.
Lo and behold, “imp” was used there to mean the shoot or sapling of a plant. There was a related Old English word, “impian,” which meant grafting a branch of one plant onto another. “Imp” seems to have referred only to plants until sometime in the 1300s, when the poem The Death of Edward III used it metaphorically to refer to the growth of a Richard II as a young boy (this one is in Middle English):
“Weor þat Impe ffully growe, Þat he had sarri sap and piþ, I hope he schulde be kud and knowe ffor Conquerour of moni a kiþ.”
(Were that imp fully grown, so that he had pleasing sap and pith, I hope he should be famous and known as conqueror of many a nation.)
According to historical records, that hope didn’t pan out; RIchard II did grow up to be king, but never conquered anybody. As for “imp,” another work from a few decades later (in 1411) shows that “imp” began to be used to refer directly to people, instead of plants. To princes, at the very least:
“O litell booke, who yafe the hardynesse Thy wordes to pronounce in the presence Of kynges Impe and princes worthynesse?”
(Oh little book, who gave [you] the courage to pronounce your words in the presence of the king’s imp and the excellence of princes?) By the way, notice these passages are getting more understandable as the get more recent?
That quote is from Regiment of Princes by Thomas Hoccleve. He’s referring to the young Henry V, who really did grow up to do a bunch of conquering.
So by about 1400 “imp” was commonly used to mean people instead of plants. But there’s not yet any connotation of devilishness. That’s first recorded in 1526, when the Pylgrimage of Perfection includes the line “ymps of serpentes,” meaning, in context, some sort of demons. Young demons, or at least small ones. Notice that the reference specifies “of serpents” to clarify what “imp” means in context.
By 1584 there’s no need to include such a clarification. The Discoverie of Witchcraft from that year simply includes “imp” in a quite exhaustive listing of “spirits, witches, centaurs, giants, and even something called “tritons.” “Triton” was the son of Poseidon in Greek mythology (which explains its use for naming a class of US Navy submarines), but it’s not entirely clear what “tritons” are in the context of that list.
In any case, “imp” started out as a non-metaphoric plant, became a metaphor for growing children, then simply meant children non-metaphorically. After that it jumped directly to a non-metaphorical sort of demon (obviously that writer had kids), and for its next trick became a metaphor for children again, but this time retaining the devilish sense. The association with plants, at some point, died on the vine. Probably cursed by one of those nasty imps.
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