Pylimitics

“Tawdry” means cheap and showy — like plastic jewelry, for example. But the word has an interesting history. In the 600s (or possibly the 800s; sources disagree), there was a queen in part of England (in those days kingdoms — and ‘queendoms’ — were often about the size of a modern town) named Aethelthrȳth. She was apparently quite religious, and lived like a nun, but she regretted very much that when she was a girl she had loved wearing lace bands around her neck. She had a fan club — or “admirers”, as they were called — and when she died, reportedly of a tumor in her throat, they thought it was OBVIOUS that this had t o be connected to those lace ornaments, or at least to her regret about liking such a worldly thing. Or something like that. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, but her fan club managed to convince whatever pope there was at the time to declare her a saint. But in Italy, there was probably a conversation something like “Aethelthrȳth? What kind of a name is that? How do you even pronounce it?? Oh never mind, just call her ‘Saint Audry’.”

At that point her fan club stepped in again. Now that they’d gotten her named a saint (even if the actual naming didn’t go quite as smoothly as they might have wished), they started an annual celebration, Saint Audry’s Fair, in Ely, England. The fair is still happening, although not every year (the local Lion’s Club stages it, and there’s been at least one reenactment in the US). But anyway, back to Aethelthrȳth’s neck. 

Her fan club, thinking about as clearly as ever, made and sold lace neckbands at the fair — this is a fair, remember, held in honor of somebody who they thought died because of exactly that kind of ornamentation. But in any case, that’s what they did, and the fair got pretty well known as the best place to go if you wanted a nice piece of lace to wear around your neck. 

Lots of people back then DID want something like that — a band of lace worn around the neck, by the way, is what the word “necklace” originally meant (get it? “Neck lace?”) . But English being the free-for-all that it is, “Saint Audry” eventually got shortened to “taudry” and the spelling pretty soon revised to “tawdry”. It meant, at first, lace purchased at that fair. 

The fair got more and more popular, and eventually the discount lace-makers arrived, undercutting everybody’s prices with inferior products that looked good, but only lasted a short while. They flooded the market for lace in the area, giving everything sold at the fair a bad reputation for poor quality. The same thing happens today; remember ‘hoverboards’ from a couple years back? The two-wheeled things you ride on until they explode or catch fire? In any case, wearing lace around your neck eventually fell out of fashion, and “tawdry” came to mean anything cheap and showy —- nothing to do with lace, the fair ,or even queen Aethelthrȳth.

The morals of the story? Be very careful if you start a fan club; you might end up adding words to English, but not in a good way. And if you’re in a fan club, maybe don’t celebrate the very thing you think killed your idol?