FLIRTING’S HISTORY

Taranaki Daily News, 9 July 1929, Page 11

FLIRTING’S HISTORY

THE INCONSTANT SWAIN. PLAYING AT COURTSHIP. I l I The charming art ■of flirtation has been so strongly associated with the modern girl that the verb “to flirt” seems to belong to this century. In the reign of Louis XIV. the courtiers and even the King himself spent many an idle hour in the shady nooks of the gardens of Versailles indulging in the pastime of coquetry. That was nothing new, for surely it was done in the hanging gardens of Babylon; But in the gardens of Versailles, where courtiers swept tho paths with their befcathered hats, and ladies bowed their peruked heads in recognition, and blossoms were exchanged, symbols of unspoken words and thoughts, this perfumed coquetry was called “fleureter”— an exquisite playing with the emotions by means of flowers. Is it not possible that out of “fleureter” the word “flirt” may have grown? The question was put to Dr. Frank H. Vixetelly, maker of dictionaries. Though he docs not admit that flirt sprang from the romantic background of Versailles, ho avows that originally “flirt” was accepted as a contracted form of the French “fleureter,” from “fleur,” to go a-flowering. In Cotgrave’s dictionary the definition of “fleureter” is to pass over lightly, touching a thing in going by it; metaphorically it is the bee’s nimble skipping from flower to flower as she feeds. • “Out of this,” to quote Dr. Vizetelly, “Stevens, in 1706, deducted 'to dally with; to trifle’; and why not, when he had Yver’s ‘Coinme un papillon coletant de fleurette on flcurette’? One of Punch’s versatile contributors in the summer of 1875 told his readers that 'a butterfly vagrant flits light o’er the flower beds of beauty in June.’ Here is a connection between flit and flirt, and who would quarrel with it? Everyone who notices a butterfly flitting from flower to flower in tho summer sun will cheerfully admit that its airy dance is in perfect keeping with the course of the colourful, frivolous but ephemeral and beautiful creature. “The Anglo-Saxon word for 'trifle’ is ‘fleardian’; °it may have been from this source that the Scots got ‘flyrd,’ to flirt, and ‘flird,’ to flutter; but according to Jamieson the Scottish word that means to flirt is ‘flicker.’ I flycker, as a bird© dothe when he hovereth, Je volette, I flycker, I kysse together, Je Raise! Thus wrote "Palsgrave in his 'Lesclarcissment.’” . Look where one may, Dr. Vizetelly points out, the word is associated with the very ideal of inconstancy. “In the Far East,” he says, “the bee is described e,g 'a lover, gallant, libertine’; in Brazil, where the natives are enamoured hv th®

beauty of the beelike hummingbird, the little creature is called ‘kissflower.’ The Italians apply ‘farfalla,’ butterfly, to a fickle man.” Somebody once asked: “Why is a rose red?” The answer was supplied by a contributor to “Temple Bar Magazine”; The rose of old, they say, was white, Till love one day in wanton flight, Flirting away from flower to flower A rose-tree brushed in evil hour. Once again linking the poet’s conception of the flower-loving bee with the flirt, the lexicographer quoted the following verse: And as for the bee And his industry I distrust his toilsome hours, For ho roves up and down Like a man about town, With a natural taste for flowers. Nathan Bailey, in his dictionary, defined the word flirt as a “sorry baggage, a light housewife,” and to flirt as to “banter or jeer.” That was in 1724. Turning to the Anglo-Saxon forebears of "to flirt,” Dr. Vizetelly calls attention to the fact that though Cotgrave traced flirt to the French, the dictionary of Parisian Argot, issued in 1872, defined flirtation as “gallant badinage and coquetry,” claiming that it was an Anglicism. Our more matter-of-fact English ancestors did not take flirting in so light a mood. Among the old authors it did not "mean to trifle with, as in wooing. “Originally,” says the editor of the Standard Dictionary, “it meant to jerk or pull lightly away, to flicker. Dekker, in one of his plays, ‘Sat iromas tic,’.makes one of his characters say: “Tis thy fashion to flirt ink in every man’s face.’ Swift, in ‘The Tattler,' explains flirting as ‘that sprinkling which some careless quean flirts on you from her mop.’ Poetically George Colman used the couplet: Flirting his sweet and tiny shower Upon a milk-white April flower In the ‘Lady of Wreck.’ “In the days when we were not so hard put to it for thrills the English traveller Richard Eden reminded the people of his time that the .natives of New India, as he termed it, enjoyed nose-thrills, ‘flirting’ upward and wide when they turned up their noses at anything that they did not like. “In the prologue to Sheridan s School for Scandal’ the word was first used in the sense of coquetry by David Garrick. But it was left to George Eliot to remind us in ‘Adam Bede’ that ‘every man likes to flirt with a pretty girl, and every pretty girl likes to be flirted with. To play at courtship is not by any means modern. Earl Buchan, whose Fugitive Eassays’ were issued anonymously in 1793, took note of the fact that the 'men of his time flirted with the beauties of his day.’”