The English language abounds in idiomatic expressions that, if taken literally, would be utterly confusing to modern speakers. They are a source of endless trouble to people for whom English is a second or temporary language.
For native speakers, the intended sense is learned during childhood by inference from the context: we have no need to analyse the exception which proves the rule into its linguistic constituents. We have a vague idea of its meaning, we use it as a conversation filler, and we are untroubled by the thought that an exception should disprove (or at least qualify) a rule.
Prove, in this idiom, does not mean demonstrate or validate. It has the earlier meaning of test. It comes ultimately from the Latin probare: to test. This sense was current until late in the nineteenth century, but it survives also in the idiom the proof of the pudding is in the eating — that is, a thing is tested by putting it to its intended use.
The same sense (and the etymological origins of the word) survives in proving a will: if the will is proved, probate is granted. In Scottish law, a trial without a jury is still called a proof: it is the occasion when the case of the pursuer is tested.
Jot or tittle is an idiom that means any small thing. Curiously, it is close in origin to the idiom which commands attention to every small detail: dot the is and cross the ts. (This is one place where the urge to use an inappropriate apostrophe is almost irresistible.) Jot is a variant of iota, the Greek name for the letter i. Iota is still used alone to mean something small, generally by negation: there is not one iota of evidence. In exactly the same way, it might be said there is not a jot of evidence. The meanings are identical.
The ambivalence between jot and iota is not surprising: until early in the nineteenth century, i and j were facets of the same letter. In all editions of Johnson’s Dictionary, the entry following hystericks is I, and it contains a discussion of that letter, followed by its meaning as the first-person singular pronoun. The next entry is jabber, followed by other words beginning ja-. After jazel comes ice; after idyl comes jealous, and so on. So it remained in all the editions in Johnson’s lifetime. However, the eighth edition, edited by Dr Todd (1818) recognises that i and j have ceased to be facets of the same thing, and have separated into two different letters. Nevertheless, the eighth edition has the entries for ice following the entry for jazel. Iota and jot are small reminders of the way it was.
So a jot is simply the letter i. A tittle is any diacritic mark in text, such as an accent, a cedilla, or a tilde. Nowadays, it refers specifically to the dot above the letter i. So reference to every jot and tittle is a reminder of the importance of dotting the i.
When we speak of letting the cat out of the bag, we reveal a secret deceit. This homely expression traces its origins to Elizabethan times, and had become idiomatic by 1760. At country fairs suckling pigs would be offered for sale, but the unsuspecting purchaser would be handed a sack with a cat or a puppy inside. The fraud would be revealed only later when the purchaser let the cat out of the bag. Until that moment, the buyer had bought a pig in a poke: a poke was a small bag or sack; it is cognate with pouch and with the French poche. The Scottish equivalent of this expression, significantly — and more accurately — is to buy a cat in a poke. The same ruse gives rise to the expression buy a pup.
In the Roman Catholic tradition, believers tell their beads — that is, count off the beads of the rosary as they say prayers. The expression has a long and interesting history. Originally, a bede (or bead) was a prayer or, more loosely, a wish. It is an Anglo-Saxon word dating from the ninth century. Bid is a variant form of bede, and one current sense of bid still retains its connection with bede: when we bid a person farewell, we wish them fortune; when we bid a person goodnight, we likewise express a wish for them. This is a different sense of bid from that which auctioneers understand. So, to bid a bead is a tautology. Bidding the bedes simply meant praying the prayers. And one of the prayers — the bidding prayer — was a list of intercessions on behalf of the various estates and conditions of mankind in special need of divine help.
The French equivalent of bede was priere (from Latin preccare, whence imprecation), which gradually altered to prayer and ousted the Anglo-Saxon bede. By this time, however, bidding the bedes was an established usage; and an established habit was to count off the prayers using a string of small globules of glass or semi-precious stones strung together in a circlet. These became symbolic for, and then synonymous with, the prayers they represented, and came to be called bedes (from the sixteenth century spelled beads). They retained that name even after the metaphysical thing they represented adopted a French name.
As the bedes were said, they were told — counted — by moving the fingers to the next bede. From the tenth to the nineteenth century, tell had the meaning ‘to mention or name one by one, specifying them as one, two, three, etc; hence, to ascertain from the number of the last how many there are in the whole series; to enumerate, reckon in; to reckon up, count, number’. From this, we get the teller (formerly seen in banks, and currently seen in parliament on a division); and when the tally is known we may say there are so many all told. Although these forms survive, this sense of tell is obsolete.
There once existed in Scotland an order of paupers called the King’s Bedesmen. They were paid by the king to say prayers for the wellbeing of the royal person and their dominion. These were aligned in spirit to the original beggars: an order of mendicants founded in the twelfth century by Lambert le Begue (he was a stammerer; begue is French for stammer). Members of the order were called Beguins. The sisterhood he founded were the Beguines — Lambert was the first to Begin the Beguine. They lived by seeking alms from others. By the fourteenth century they had come to be called Beghards; in the late fourteenth century the Beguins attracted the wrath of the Council of Treves, and later that of the Inquisition. Thus were the beggars disgraced.
Oddly, while Pope John XXII attacked the Beghards, he protected the Beguines, who still exist in small communities in the Netherlands.
But, for the most part, what had started as a pure religious calling was brought down in society and in language equally.