hackneyed

Are the Rolling Stones hackneyed?

They just came out with a new album, Hackney Diamonds, almost 60 years after their first album! Are hackneyed diamonds tired old gems? At this point, are the Stones just a bunch of hacks flogging a dead horse? Do they keep at it for lack of a better choice? After all, Mick’s 80 years old. It gives kind of a new edge on being “shattered, shattered”… but with an unexpected facet.

You see, Hackney diamonds is a slang term for the shattered glass of a window that’s been broken for burglary. (“Whole Wide World,” the fifth track on the album, starts with “The streets I used to walk on are full of broken glass” – but doesn’t mention Hackney.) Hackney is a district on the north side of the East End of London, and it’s historically… not posh. But nowadays, it’s hip and full of hidden gems. None of the Stones are actually from there, though (and, although part of Hackney is called Clapton, Eric Clapton isn’t from there either).

The exact origin of the name Hackney is unclear, but it has nothing to do with knees. The -ey suggests that in Old English it referred to an island, probably in the marshland between two streams. The Hackn- part… well, that hasn’t been hacked decisively. By the way, while hack as in ‘chop’ or ‘break into’ isn’t related to Hackney, hack as in ‘writer for hire’ is. It’s taken from the sense ‘horse for hire’, which is shortened from Hackney, as in the place. 

It seems there were meadows in or near Hackney where such horses were pastured. The thing about horses for hire is that they got worn out over time. Ridden too hard, too long, too often. Before you’re flogging a dead horse, you’re already dealing with something that’s gotten hackneyed – used up like a tired old jade, long since broken. Hackney doesn’t have much in the way of horse pastures now, but hackney was a byword for hired horses by the 1400s; by the 1500s it was applied to hired persons (not in a positive tone), and before 1600s it was applied to idioms tired from overuse. Hackneyed (past participle) appeared a few decades after that. Which means that it’s been ridden hard and long too. But still it perseveres, like a diamond (I’d say unbroken, but it has also been cracked down to hack)… 

As a side note, one stable keeper (though not in Hackney) dealt with the problem of people wanting to take out just his best horses – wearing them down quickly – and not wanting to take out his tired horses by offering them a simple choice: take the horse closest to the door, or don’t take a horse. The stable owner was named Hobson, and now we call something a Hobson’s choice if it’s not really a choice, is it.

But did the Rolling Stones face a Hobson’s choice?

I mean, come on, they don’t need the money. They don’t need the fame. They don’t walk on streets full of broken glass. But on the other hand, the album doesn’t sound tired and trite. I guess the thing is that a rolling stone doesn’t get to choose whether it keeps rolling.