Grammar Girl here.
I'm Mignon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language.
Today we're going to look at the origin of the phrase pride and prejudice, and then we'll look at whether Parson Brown in the song Winter Wonderland was a real person.
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The novelist Jane Austen was born exactly 250 years ago on December 16th.
The following segment that I'm running in her honor was written by Margie Burns from the University of Maryland.
Most readers hear pride and prejudice and immediately think of Jane Austen's most famous novel, that salty, sweet confection of romance and irony, with a fairy tale ending.
Few people however, know the history of the phrase pride and prejudice, which I explore in my new book Jane Austen Abolitionist The Loaded History of the Phrase Pride and Prejudice.
Like most Austen fans and scholars, I had read and loved her novels for years without learning much about the history of the title which Austen chose after scrapping the original one.
First Impressions
By the 20th century, pride and prejudice became solely associated with Austen's 1813 novel.
The phrase, which has religious origins, appeared in hundreds of works before Austen was born.
From Britain, it traveled to America, and from religious tomes, it expanded to secular works.
It even became a hallmark of abolitionist writing.
While 2025 marks Austen's 250th birthday.
The phrase pride and prejudice first appeared more than 400 years ago in religious writings by English Protestants.
As the daughter sister, cousin and granddaughter of Church of England, ministers Austen was certainly aware of the tradition.
If ministers wanted to reproach their parishioners or their opponents, they attributed criticism of their sermons to pride and prejudice, as coming from people too arrogant and narrow-minded to entertain their words in good faith.
While the usage began in the Church of England, other denominations, even radical ones, soon adopted it.
Pride and prejudice appears in the writings of nonconformists Anabaptists Quakers, dissenters and other representatives of schism, faction and sedition, as one anonymous writer called them.
One early takeaway is that, amid fervent religious conflicts, various denominations similarly used pride and prejudice as a criticism.
The unnamed minister himself complained that, owing to quote At the same time, the phrase could be invoked to support religious tolerance and in pleas for inclusiveness.
An anonymous clergyman wrote in 1734.
Quote In the 18th century, advances in publishing led to an explosion of secular writing.
For the first time, regular people could buy books about history, politics, and philosophy.
These popular texts spread the phrase pride and prejudice to even more distant shores.
One fan was American founding father Thomas Paine.
In his 47-page pamphlet Common Sense, Paine argued that kings could not be trusted to protect democracy.
Quote.
Laying aside all national pride and prejudice in favor of modes and forms, the plain truth is that it's wholly owing to the constitution of the people and not to the constitution of the government that the crown is not as repressive in England as in Turkey unquote.
Others include Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe, in his 1708 essay Review of the State of the British Nation.
Defoe satirically exhorted the public to vote Tory rather than electing men of sense, to quote dispel the poisons that sloth envy, pride and prejudice may have contracted and bring the blood of the party into a true circulation unquote.
After the philosophers, historians, and the political commentators came the novelists.
And among the novelists, female writers were especially important.
My annotated list in Jane Austen Abolitionist includes more than a dozen female writers using the phrase between 1758 and 1812, the year Austen finished revising Pride and Prejudice.
Among them was Frances Burney.
Scholars have often attributed Austen's famous title to Burney, who used the phrase Pride and Prejudice in her novel Cecilia.
But Burney wasn't alone.
Female novelists who used the expression before Austen included Charlotte Lennox, sisters Harriet and Sophia Lee, Charlotte Turner Smith, Mrs Calpoise, Anne Seymour Damer and mother and daughter Susanna and Elizabeth Gunning, who jointly authored their novel The Heir Apparent.
As the critique embodied in the phrase progressed beyond religious and partisan conflict, it became increasingly used in the contexts of ethics and social reform.
My most striking discovery in this research is the long-standing association of the phrase pride and prejudice with abolitionism, the movement to eradicate enslavement and the slave trade.
The leaders of transnational anti-slavery organizations used it at their conventions and in the books and periodicals they published.
In 1843, 30 years after the publication of Austen's Pride and Prejudice, British Quaker Thomas Clarkson wrote to the General Anti-Slavery Convention which was meeting in London.
He exhorted the faithful to repudiate slavery at once and forever, if there were any among them whose eyes may be so far blinded or their consciences so far seared by interest or ignorance, pride or prejudice, as still to sanction or uphold this unjust and sinful system.
He even used the phrase twice, acknowledging that some violent abolitionists had aroused reaction.
He warned his audience that this state of feeling arises as much from pride and prejudice on the one hand as from indiscretion or impropriety on the other.
At the funeral for abolitionist John Brown, the minister prayed over his body, quote, unquote.
Use of the phrase didn't end with emancipation or the end of the U.S.
Civil War.
In fact, it was one of Frederick Douglass' favorite phrases.
On October 22 1883, in his Address at Lincoln Hall, Douglass excoriated the Supreme Court's decision rendering the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional.
As was typical of Douglass, the speech ranged beyond racial inequalities.
Color prejudice is not the only prejudice against which a republic like ours should guard.
The spirit of caste is malignant and dangerous.
Everywhere there's the prejudice of the rich against the poor, the pride and prejudice of the idle dandy against the hard-handed working man unquote.
Early on in Pride and Prejudice, the conceited Carolyn Bingley snipes that Elizabeth Bennet shows quote.
Later, the snobbish Lady Catherine accuses Bennet of being headstrong.
But near the ending, Mr. Darcy tells Bennet that he loves her for the liveliness of her mind.
In this respect, Bennett reflects a quality that all of Austen's heroines possess.
While they try to adhere to standards of courtesy and respect, none are guilty of saying only what the leading man wants to hear.
Given that Austen chose her title to honor the phrase and its history, it's ironic that her own fame ended up drowning out the abolitionist associations of pride and prejudice after the Civil War.
If there is any work of fiction that successfully makes self-sufficiency, independent thinking and open-mindedness look good and makes sycophants, rigidity and hysterical devotion to rank and status look bad, it is pride and prejudice.
Yet the lasting popularity of Austen's novel demonstrates that the ethics contained in the phrase continue to resonate today, even if its context has been lost.
That segment was written by Margie Burns, a lecturer of English at the University of Maryland in Baltimore County.
It originally appeared in The Conversation and appears here through a Creative Commons license.
Next, I have a piece by Ashley Dodge.
The other day, while humming Winter Wonderland, these two lines started to make me wonder who was Parson Brown.
In the meadow we can build a snowman and pretend that he is Parson Brown.
The song Winter Wonderland was written in 1934 by composer Felix Bernard and lyricist Richard Bernard, Dick Smith.
Although it's winter-themed, in the Northern Hemisphere we tend to treat it as a beloved holiday song.
And here's an interesting fact.
Winter Wonderland was penned by a man in quarantine.
According to his widow, Dick Smith was inspired to write the lyrics as he gazed out at children playing in the snow from the window of West Mountain Sanitarium in Scranton Pennsylvania, where he was recovering from tuberculosis.
When Smith rallied and was able to leave the hospital, he returned to New York and collaborated with his composer friend Felix Bernard to create the popular song we know today.
So, was Parson Brown someone of cultural significance at the time the song was written?
Well, at first glance, and looking at the lyrics that follow, it seems as if Parson Brown would be a minister.
He'll say, are you married?
We'll say, no, man, but you can do the job when you're in town.
So during the time when the song was written, Parsons a term for Protestant or Anglican ministers would sometimes travel from town to town performing wedding ceremonies for those who didn't have a local minister of their own faith.
But is there any significance to Parson Brown?
Well, it seems it could either have been a specific Parson the couple knew who came to their town, or a placeholder title similar to John Doe.
As far as I can tell, there was no famous Parson Brown in the 1900s.
As a side note, have you noticed that there are two versions of the bridge in Winter Wonderland?
A 1947 version replaces Parson Brown with Circus Clown.
I'm not going to sing.
In the meadow we can build a snowman and pretend that he's a circus clown.
We'll have lots of fun with Mr. Snowman until the other kitties knock him down.
This lyric change was apparently made to make the song more child-friendly.
In the past.
Wikipedia also suggested that the change occurred because traveling Parsons were no longer part of the American cultural scene.
So the bottom line is that Parson Brown probably wasn't a real person, but we can enjoy singing about him nonetheless.
That segment was by Ashley Dodge, who was my assistant many years ago and is now an elementary school teacher.
Finally, I have a familect story from Jonathan.
Hi, Mignon.
This is Jonathan.
I'm calling from Madison, Wisconsin.
I have a familect to share with you.
So my wife and I both study German, and we occasionally pepper our speech with words or phrases in German.
And once, when she was walking around the neighborhood with our young children, they were about to cross the street.
So she put out her hands and instead of saying, hold hands, she randomly said it in German.
Halte die Hände.
Well, to our kids, that sounded like happy panda, which they thought was funny.
So after that, happy panda became what we say when we need to hold one another's hands for safety.
Thank you, Jonathan.
That is so cute.
I laughed out loud when you first said happy panda.
Familects are words or phrases you use with your family that nobody else does.
They're like your private language.
And people have friendilects with their friends, too.
If you want to share the story of your familect or friendilect, leave a message on the voicemail line at 833214GIRL or record a message on SpeakPipe.
You'll find both of those in the show notes.
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And I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl.
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Thanks for listening.
