I was asked why someone who is thrifty is thought of as spending their money wisely, while a spendthrift is someone who doesn’t spend their money wisely. Of course the reason for this lies in one of the older meanings of thrift. But the reason we can’t recognize it more easily has to do with a phenomenon I talked about in my episode on the word vixen. Fox and vixen are really two forms of the same word because people in southern England liked to pronounce this word with a V while people in the north liked it better with an F.

So if I take our word thrift and exchange the F for a V, I get thrive—or near enough. So that’s what thrift meant when it first appeared in written form back in 1305; thriving, prospering and succeeding.

From there it makes sense that another meaning to the word was “the means by which you were prospering and succeeding”, so that your thrift was your “income” and what you were able to save. So that’s why thrifty means “thrifty”; you can prosper more if you have more money coming in than going out.

Similarly, if thrift means your “income”, now we can understand why being a spendthrift is a bad thing. You can’t grow and prosper if you habitually spend every penny you get.

I mentioned that the favored pronunciation in the north was with an F and it appears that this word, although it isn’t documented until the early fourteenth century, this word didn’t come from the south—from France—but instead from the north and Old Norse. Some 400 years before the appearance of the word thrift the whole northern half of England had been controlled by the Vikings and since books get more and more scarce the further back in time you go, it’s just as-luck-would-have-it that the word only shows up for us in 1305. It must have been in use long before that—and quite likely was written down but lost—and slowly, as the north of England became more English, this word wheedled its way south and became more English too—so much so that it changed its pronunciation and spelling and left a clone in thrive.

Now here’s a quote from someone who never had to be very thrifty; Jennie Jerome Churchill:

We owe something to extravagance, for thrift and adventure seldom go hand in hand.

She could afford to say that. You know how when you look up people’s bio it usually says their profession? For example Joe Blow, candle merchant. Beside Jeannie Jerome Churchill’s dad’s name it says “sportsman and speculator.” Beside her name it says “society hostess.”

She had a couple of kids. One of them was named Winston Churchill, you may have heard of him. When she died Winston said

On the whole it was a life of sunshine.

That’s what I call thriving.