"Well Met" - What! It's combat?

[Father Bill]

Some time ago, our friend Jock Scot (yes, he's okay, just temporarily otherwise engaged) asked about this phrase which seemed odd to him. There was quite a discussion about it in a now-closed thread. http://www.xmarksthescot.com/forum/f105/well-met-88366/

Well, I think I've found it, and in its origins it perhaps has nothing whatever to do with "Howdy, how ya doin'?"

In swordsmanship, when one combattant attacked another and that other "met" his blade with his own, thus preventing injury to himself, it was sometimes said with a glint in the eye, "Well met, Sir!" This later spread to other forms of combat, particularly oral argument or debate, formal or otherwise.

Using it as the "Howdy, how ya doin'?" is apparently the linguistic abberation and maybe even rather a misappropriation with little syntactical meaning.

SO! Let the combat recommence!

(Seems to me to be an odd thing to say.)

[MacGumerait]

Father Bill , I agree . I mentioned this same viewpoint in post # 35 of the closed thread .

Cheers , Mike

[Steve Ashton]

The phrase is still used in Fencing today. Or at least it was in my day.

bon riposte.

[Kiltedjohn]

How far back does the "swordsmanship" meaning go? There seem to be quite a few references to the phrase, as meaning "good to meet you", going back a number of centuries.
See for example
http://english.stackexchange.com/que...pposed-to-mean

[KD Burke]

I think we should keep in mind that people in "Ye Olden Days" were just as smart as we are, they just didn't have the same knowledge base. Irony and sarcasm are not recent inventions. Therefore, just as modern phrases may have multiple meanings, depending upon context, so did old phrases.

[tripleblessed]

It has been noted that the "good to meet you" meaning of this phrase is known predominantly in the southern US. It might,therefore, be relevant to remind ourselves that musical anthropologists recovered lost songs and repaired lyrics, clearly mangled in the Isles, by spending time in the Appalachian Mountains. Around the beginning of the last century they found pockets of folk still speaking virtually unchanged Elizabethan English, and handing down songs carefully preserved verbatim. This usage may be a remnant of earlier parallel meanings, as suggested above. While some in the UK have said that if "you lot" were so intent on pretending to be Scots or British, we shouldn't have left.This completely ignores the fact that most had no desire to leave. Many, many, were forcibly shipped, and billed for their passage. Many were put on ships with deliberately insufficient food, and many starved on the way. Children were shipped to mine and factory owners as free labor. Prisoners of war were sold as slaves. Some left, yes, of their own volition. Because the system had completely disenfranchised the lower classes to the point there was nothing for them where they were no matter what they did. Common land that fed and housed people for centuries was simply taken by "gentry" with no recourse for those on the bottom. Dispossessed people often cling to any scraps and shreds of "home" they can, and try to forget the pain.

Or it might be something else altogether.

[Dani Mac]

The phrase is still used in Fencing today. Or at least it was in my day.

bon riposte.

The fencers in my family use it as "Thanks for a good bout."

[neloon]

As tripleblessed implies, "well met" is just a usage that has become obsolete in the UK although, even in Shakespeare's day, it would not have been used with somebody one had not previously met. Its sense would have been "I'm glad I bumped into you because..." (Or the reverse - "Ill met by moonlight, Titania" from "Midsummer Night's Dream"!)
The "Fall" is another US usage strange to our ears but was normal in the UK 400 years ago. Likewise the very archaic (except in Scots) "gotten" and so on.
Alan

[CDNSushi]

Huh. And here I thought that Blizzard invented it specifically for the NPC dwarves to say in World of Warcraft... Lol.

[tripleblessed]

As tripleblessed implies, "well met" is just a usage that has become obsolete in the UK although, even in Shakespeare's day, it would not have been used with somebody one had not previously met. Its sense would have been "I'm glad I bumped into you because..." (Or the reverse - "Ill met by moonlight, Titania" from "Midsummer Night's Dream"!)
The "Fall" is another US usage strange to our ears but was normal in the UK 400 years ago. Likewise the very archaic (except in Scots) "gotten" and so on.
Alan

Alan, as you note, this usage is normally for folk you know and are happy to see: "Well met, you got my sixty bucks?
I just had a flat." But I've also heard it serve to greet strangers: "Well met, kind of you to stop, as my spare's also flat,
and it's six miles to town. Now if my cousin might be in town so as to get my sixty bucks and a ride back out here with
something to get me down the road........"