“It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it,” Maurice Switzer wrote (I have no idea who he was, but I can attribute it to him). In other words, keep your mouth shut and you won’t let the cat out of the box.
But we also know that ignorance is bliss. From which it follows that the more nonsense you let pass your lips the happier you will famously be – you will be nice and silly. To be blither, blither. The more you blither, the blither you are.
Whaddya mean, that makes no sense? I’m saying you are blither when you blither.
Ahem.
The more blather you emit, the more blithe you become.
What was so hard about that?
OK, do you want to know how we come to have two words, blither and blither, which are not said the same (in case it’s not obvious, blither rhymes with wither, while blither sounds like er tacked onto blithe, which rhymes with writhe and tithe), and which do not mean the same (the one means ‘talk foolishly, babble’ and the other means ‘happier, more carefree’)? Do you want to know how it has happened that, with a little vowel movement, you can make such a quantum leap in sense? It begins with two Old Germanic words, one of which entered Middle English from Old Norse and the other of which came up from Anglo-Saxon.
For the one blither, Old Norse blaðra ‘talk stupidly’ was a verbing of Old Norse blaðr ‘nonsense’. It became Middle English blather, which, in the north of England and in Scotland, shifted up and forward in the mouth to become blether. And then blether shifted even farther up to become blither, which still meant the same thing. All three vowels, a, e, and i, are short, so it’s like when can gets pronounced “ken” and “kin” – kin ya see thet?
And all three words stayed in usage, though blether is generally seen as a Scottish version, and blither is used mainly in the adjectival participle blithering, which is now (and since at least the late 1800s) mostly used to modify idiot (or a similar word). Indeed, when one speaks of “a blithering idiot” or of “blithering incompetence,” there isn’t even necessarily an image of babbling incoherently; it’s just a withering criticism of dithering – it means more ‘utter fool’ than ‘uttering fool’. But you can still use blither as a verb, and it will carry with it that stronger association with personal inanity: “Stop blathering” conveys “Stop talking senselessly” while “Stop blithering” conveys “Stop talking like a senseless person.”
For the other blither, Anglo-Saxon blīþe ‘happy, gentle’ – which in its turn came from earlier words meaning pretty much the same thing – became Middle English blithe. That became Modern English blithe, which has the comparative form blither and the superlative form blithest. Thanks to uses like “blithe spirit” and “blithe indifference,” it now carries a tone not so much of ecstatic bliss as of ignorant bliss, or at least lack of care.
But it’s only because of the vagaries of historical phonology that blither has come to look like blither but not quite to sound like it. There are two things that brought blīþe towards blaðra. (Well, three, but the final e that disappeared in the pronunciation of the adjective is restored in the comparative.)
First, you may notice that both ð in blaðra and þ in blīþe became th, which is in fact what always happened – those two letters weren’t in use in French or Dutch or other languages exerting influence on Middle English. You may also remember from your Icelandic lessons that ð is voiced like in this while þ is voiceless like in thin. Well, in Old English, phonology intervened and caused voicing changes, so because there was a vowel on either side of the þ in blīþe, it also became voiced.
Second, you may notice from the macron that the I in blīþe is long (they didn’t write it with a macron at the time, but it’s a modern scholarly practice to aid those of us who don’t speak the language on a daily basis). What that means is that it was actually said for a longer duration, and also a bit higher in the mouth – so instead of like in shin, it was like in machine, only maybe more as your nephew says it when talking about his car: machiiine.
But then what happened is, over a stretch of time in later Middle English, English’s long vowels became English’s long vowels, by which I mean they went from being actually long to being what we now think of as “long,” which with vowels means a whole different vowel, or rather a diphthong. Long a, which was once as in “stick out your tongue and say aa,” became basically short e leading into short i. Long e moved up into i-land. And long I became more like short a leading into short i. (Look up “Great Vowel Shift” for more details.)
But of course we didn’t change how we wrote it. That would make too much sense. And making sense is not what English’s sound and spelling are about. But we love it for its chaos. And we use it as a filter for who knows and who doesn’t. If you want to be thought of sound mind, you must mind the sound.
So, in the matter of blither and blither, a closed mouth is like Schrödinger’s box. As long as you have no sound (or adequate context), you can’t tell which side you’re on of the equation “ignorance is bliss” (or, more precisely, “evidence of ignorance is increase of bliss”). As long as the cat’s got your tongue, the two are in quantum superposition. But once you open your mouth, it’s like opening Schrödinger’s box and looking in on the cat.
So now you know. Happy?
Sesquiotica 