Why is “fast food” a self-contradiction? If an athlete who is fast does a lot of running, why does a “colourfast” t-shirt have colours that never run? And if you’re fast asleep, how quickly can you wake up?
If you’ve been following these articles, you will have noticed that I’m not interested in talking only about vocabulary: each word gives me an excuse to explore some lane, avenue or super-highway of the English language. First I thought that the word fast would give me a nice opportunity for some revision of parts of speech, as it’s the only word I know that, without any addition to its four letters, can be a noun, a verb, an adjective or an adverb. But then I realized that it’s a word that can also lead us into interesting alleyways of that verbal equivalent of archaeology, detective work and genetics that we call etymology. First, let’s run through those parts of speech:
Anything that can be plural, and – when singular – can have “a” or “an” before it is a countable noun. A fast (plural – several fasts) is a period of not eating – or purposely eating very little - generally for either religious or health reasons. If you’ve ever wondered what we break when we eat our first meal of the day, now you know.
As so often in English, the noun – unchanged – can also work as a verb (think of how we can either diet or go on a diet, have a drink or drink something, and either search or do a search on the internet). Fasting means not eating on purpose. I fast, he fasts, they fasted during Ramadan.
If fast food were a compound noun (like picnic snacks), it could refer to tiny, austere meals for monks or anorexics. It doesn’t, of course: it means food that is quick to prepare, serve and eat. Fast cars, fast delivery, and fast broadband are things that happen or move at high speed: as an adjective – a describing word that we can put before a noun, or after the verb to be - fast means “quick, rapid, speedy”.
But fast isn’t only the opposite of slow: it is also the opposite of slowly. When he’s not fasting, the monk eats fast. When it describes the way someone does something, fast is an adverb. Instinct and experience tell you to say “fastly” – ignore them. “Fastly” doesn’t exist. A slow dance is danced slowly, the quickstep is learnt quickly, a gavotte is danced fast.
But adverbs don’t only describe verbs; they also describe adjectives. Asleep is an adjective. To emphasize the fact that someone is not only asleep, but properly, really, soundly asleep, we might use one of those adverbs you can see in the line above, but, strangely, what we usually say is fast asleep. Why?
The expression fast asleep, which has nothing to do with either speed or abstinence, takes us back to the original meaning of the word fast, the meaning that, as a common ancestor, connects these two apparently unrelated ideas of a fast / to fast and fast car / drive fast. This ancestral fast has mostly disappeared from English, but has left us big clues as to its meaning, such as the verb fasten, which is what you do to your seatbelt when you start a car or plane journey. Think of other transitive verbs that end with –en: to widen is to make something wide; to tighten is to make something tight; to darken is to make something dark: so to fasten our seatbelt is to make it fast, which is to say “secure, firmly fixed”.
It was this idea of being fixed, immobile, secure or steady that was the essence of the Old English adjective fæst, and adverb fæste, and the adverb fast retains this meaning in certain expressions that you’ll still hear today – if something is stuck fast, you can’t move it, fast friends have a secure bond between them, and fast colours in a fabric are permanent - they that won’t change, fade or run. Can this meaning really be related to the modern one- “speedy/quickly” - which seems to be its opposite? Well, paradoxical as it may seem, it can.
The adverb came first. Fast was “strongly”, “tenaciously”, “determinedly” and “closely”, so someone running with tenacity and determination could be described as running fast; a hunter following his prey closely would be following fast. This meaning was already taking root in the Middle English of the 13th century, and fast as an adjective had added its modern meaning by the mid 16th century.
And that same tenacity and unmovable strength (of will) was associated with the religious devotion of those who went without food. The Gothic word fastan meant “to keep or observe (to stick fast to) a tradition or rule”, of which the modern meaning of “abstain from eating” was one possible application, but in Old English fæsten already had this meaning.
The English language changes fast, but it’s always interesting to see how some words hold fast to their origins…
#parts of speech #etymology #compound nouns
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