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Monday, December 30, 2013
bespoke
bespoke
[bɪˈspoʊk]
a.
1.) Custom-made. Said especially of clothes.
2.) Making or selling custom-made clothes: ''a bespoke tailor'' (
American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language).
Etymology: Old English
be-
, weak or stressless form of the preposition and adverb
bí
(
biᴁ
), by. The original Teutonic form was, as in Gothic,
bi
, with short vowel, probably cognate with second syllable of Greek
ἀµϕί
, Latin
ambi
; in Old High German and early Old English, when it had the stress, as a separate word, and in composition with a noun, it was lengthened to
bī
(
bî
,
bí
), while the stressless form, in composition with a verb or indeclinable word, remained
bi-
; in later Old English, as in Middle High German and modern German, the latter was obscured to
be-
(also occasionally in Old English as an unaccented form of the preposition): cf. Old English
bígęng
, practice,
biganga
n,
begangan
, to practise +
spoke
, from Old English
sprecan
.
"Not impossibly, as it struck me on reflection, the spiteful individual might have a theory: he might conceive that, if a catholic chancery decree went forth, restoring to every man the things which truly belonged to him—your things to you, Cæsar's to Cæsar, mine to me—in that case, a particular brickbat fitting, as neatly as if it had been
bespoke
, to a contusion upon the calf of his own right leg, would be discovered making its way back into my great-coat pockets. Well, it might be so" ("A Sketch of My Childhood," Thomas De Quincey, 1851).
(
Il sarto
, Pietro Longhi, ~1741)
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