The Devil, You Know?

Every single one of us, the devil inside. The devil went down to Georgia; he was looking for a soul to steal. I’ve got a devil’s haircut in my mind. The devil wears Prada.

Devils are everywhere in modern popular culture.

Ancient Greeks used the word diábolos to describe someone who throws something across. This quickly became a metaphor for slander or lying about someone, so a diábolos was someone you simply couldn’t trust. The Romans slightly morphed the word into diabolus, where it became a part of the vocabulary of much of the continent of Europe.

Early Christian missionaries brought the Ecclesiastical Latin word across the Channel to England, beginning in the year 597 when Augustine of Canterbury was sent by Pope Gregory to convert the local populace. Diábolos was a mouthful for the locals, so they started using the word dēofol, which resonated with their pronunciation scheme.

After the Norman invasion, the French introduced their own way of saying this word as Norman French became the language of the court. Instead of dēofol they pronounced it diable, and it soon became written down as devel or devell, or… you guessed it: devil.

By the time of Shakespeare, the d-e-v-i-l had become standard.

This devil character came to represent the ultimate embodiment of evil in much of the Christian world. Naturally, there were plenty of sayings that arose on the basis of this understanding, with the most obvious phrases like speak of the devil, and he appears cropping up first. This was supposed to be an actual warning that mentioning something evil could actually make it appear, but by the 1700s people were using it as a joke to refer to someone who just showed up after being mentioned.

This is the evolutionary pattern many of these sorts of phrases seem to take. The devil to pay meant a Faustian bargain had been made, and this was no joking matter in renaissance England, but over time it really did become a joke of sorts. By the time of the 1700s, sailors were referring to sealing their ships with tar and other unpleasant tasks as their devils to pay.

Idle hands are the devil’s workshop was an admonition designed to remind you that the Evil One was right there waiting for your inactivity, so he could jump in and take control. Over time, this evolved to be way less scary and to imply that you should stay busy, lest you get yourself into some kind of trouble. Presumably, whatever trouble you got yourself into did not have your immortal soul hanging in the balance.

By the 1500s, something akin to better the devil you know became a popular English proverb. This phrase made light of the concept of an ultimate embodiment of all evil, suggesting that there are different versions of this devil out there, and you might just be better off sticking with the known issues of a given situation.

Now, the devil is in the details, of course.

Idle hands shows up in English first in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales as the fiend fyndeth som mischef for idel hondes—but this is Chaucer translating St. Jerome from a thousand years earlier, when the Christian church was very, very Roman. Similarly, speak of the devil first appears in print some time around 1666, but the idea of caution around naming an evil force goes back thousands of years.

This pattern repeats endlessly: deadly serious cautionary slogans centered around superstition end up as pithy jokes. Whistling past the graveyard and making light of scary things has been an important way to cope with the true uncertainties life brings.

Do you have a favorite saying that involves the devil? How about a favorite song?