origin of gingerly - English Language Usage Stack Exchange The word gingerly is: (from www wordhistories com) an adverb meaning in a careful or cautious manner, and an adjective meaning showing great care or caution Aller à pas menu: To go nicely, tread gingerly, mince it like a maid (Randle Cotgrave – A Dictionary of the French and English tongues – 1611) Gingerly:
Is walking gingerly the first usage of gingerly? And why did it . . . Your best bet for questions like this is the Oxford English DIctionary The first edition is available online without charge; it says that in its earliest use (early 16th century) gingerly was chiefly applied to dancing and walking, with the sense "daintily, elegantly" The origin is uncertain, but there is apparently no etymological connection
Gingerly, the adjective and adverb - English Language Usage Stack . . . The adjective wary and adverb warily each have gingerly as a synonym, instead of the adjectival form being ginger If it were ginger , I could also imagine the adverb being the flat ginger I hesitate before calling the adverb gingerly flat because, while it is indeed equivalent to its associated adjective rather than gaining a suffix, the
Can ginger be used as an adjective with the same sense as gingerly? The Oxford English Dictionary lists “ginger” as a synonymous backformation of “gingerly” (and unrelated to the plant color “ginger”), with examples dating back as far as 1600 Of the modern examples it says “chiefly English regional and North American” Being American, I agree that it sounds natural in some cases:
etymology - Origin of walking on eggshells? - English Language . . . Or perhaps it's from when you're trying to find where your chickens hid their eggs, and need to walk gingerly in the area Discussion in the comments raises doubts about whether there's anything more to the question than the earliest attested use of the saying: the meaning is so obvious that there couldn't be too much to it getting coined
Adverb Meaning so as not to damage something delicate or fragile tenderly gingerly meticulously precisely attentively tenuously tentatively Some of these are sorta what I'm looking for, but I feel like theres a better one, and some of these only capture part of the meaning of what I'm trying to say P S
Term or phrase for False etymology explanations False etymology: (pseudoetymology, paraetymology or paretymology), sometimes called folk etymology although this is also a technical term in linguistics, is a popularly held but false belief about the origins of specific words, often originating in "common-sense" assumptions