Vim and Vigor

March 26th, 2010 by admin

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Posted in columns, September-October 2012 | 7 comments

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7 comments on this post.

  1. Bob George:

    July 8th, 2014 at 10:02 am

    Beautifully stated and well written. Thank you.

  2. Karl:

    October 15th, 2014 at 11:13 am

    If we may continue this thread of thought, what nuance differences can you elaborate toward – vim versus verve?

  3. Suffering Fools:

    July 19th, 2015 at 7:37 pm

    Here’s probably the secret to why “vim” didn’t show up earlier despite its Latin origins.

    First of all, if you were trying to inflect the noun as it would appear in a Latin phrase as the object of “full of,” you would get the ablative case “vi” as opposed to the accusative “vim.” But nobody ever said “full of vi and vigor.” Instead, when a Latin word is used in an English sentence, it is standard practice to use the nominative case.

    If you Google the expression using the nominative case, “vis and vigor,” you get a fairly respectable number of results, most of which are from the 19th century or thereabouts. So what happened during the course of the 19th century to change “vis and vigor” to “vim and vigor”?

    Here’s where it gets interesting. Say the older form aloud and you will suddenly realize that a corruption of that phrase was probably the origin of the saying “full of piss and vinegar,” which is not attested in writing prior to the 20th century. It’s highly likely that the more educated people of the 19th century were appalled by the corrupted version of the phrase they were hearing from the unlettered masses, and tacitly agreed to use the accusative “vim” instead to avoid any misunderstandings.

    Brand new theory AFAIK, but seems pretty convincing.

  4. sherri:

    March 1st, 2016 at 9:53 am

    when referring to a young energetic athlete or a wild horse, my old uncle used the phrase “He was full of piss and vinegar”…It seems that might have come as a slang version of “vim and vigor” Has anyone else heard that?

  5. Merideth McGregor:

    June 7th, 2019 at 5:39 am

    Check out PG Wodehouse ‘ Very Good, Jeeves’
    He uses the word vim ( without the vigor)
    quite frequently!

  6. Janice Black:

    July 2nd, 2019 at 9:35 am

    Sherri, I was just now doing a web search on the origin of “vim and vinegar” because as I was thinking it in relation to my elderly cat’s behavior this morning, it suddenly occurred to me that this phrase was probably the original form of the saying that some one was full of “vinegar,” which I heard occasionally back in the Ozarks. (Without the “piss,” probably because my people were more polite than that and really tried to watch their language. My guess is that someone added “piss” in at an even later stage, because some people feel that everything sounds more forceful if it’s cruder . . . like the recent tendency to change “boatload” to “buttload.”) But all of this is just conjecture on my part.

  7. Janice Black:

    July 2nd, 2019 at 9:38 am

    Actually, I usually heard “full of vinegar” used in reference to people (especially older people), which could be another reason it wasn’t often accompanied by “piss.” I remember a visitor at my parents’ house once using an even more colorful variation of the saying, commenting about a mutual acquaintance, “That old sister was baptized in pickle juice.” Kinda miss hearing those colorful old Ozarks ways of speaking! :D

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