Perplexing Proverb

[Laurence Horn]

On Aug 4, 2011, at 3:15 PM, Dan Goncharoff wrote:

> My WAG: the original proverb was "Dark is the hour before the dawn".
> "Dark is" was misheard as "darkest", and the proverb was
> miscommunicated to fit "darkest".
>
> Scanning GB, it is around 1850 that the phrase begins to be used to
> represent periods preceding momentous change:

Maybe, but I was struck by one citing of the proverb in something like the modern form by one of the officers fighting for the Revolutionary cause in 1776. (McCullough includes a lot of quotes from letters of officers and soldiers to their friends or families.)  Unfortunately when I heard this a few weeks ago on the audiobook of David McCullough's _1776_, a chronicle of the downs and ups of that year, it was prior to the current thread, so I didn't record who said it, but the *when* was, in fact, 1776, and it was used precisely to refer to the hoped-for (and eventually achieved) "momentous change" in the fight for independence (or "independency", as it seems to have mostly been called at the time).

LH
>
> Aunt Anne's History of England on Christian principles - Page 138
> Anne (aunt, pseud.) - 1849 - Free Google eBook - Read
> "But the times of which I have been writing have been justly called
> the dark ages of England ; it was indeed that dark hour before the
> dawn of the bright day of the Reformation"
>
> DanG
>
>
>
> On Thu, Aug 4, 2011 at 10:08 AM, Shapiro, Fred <fred.shapiro at yale.edu> wrote:
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       "Shapiro, Fred" <fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU>
>> Subject:      Perplexing Proverb
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> A reader of my weekly "column" about quotations on the Freakonomics blog has asked a question that has long perplexed me.  How did the strange proverb "It's always darkest just before the dawn" arise?  We all understand the point of the proverbial metaphor, but such metaphors are usually based on an underlying commonly accepted reality.  It's just not scientifically true that it's always darkest just before the dawn.  Can anyone help me to understand this?
>>
>> Fred Shapiro
>>
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