Why can “fast” also mean immobile?

 

Milda fast asleep: she can perform this trick absolutely anywhere

Fast asleep? Fasting period? Fasten your seatbelt? How come we have so many expressions that use “fast”, but actually mean the opposite? Better ask the Scandinavians, Dutch and Germans…

English has a seemingly bizarre vocabulary that only makes sense if you know where words come from. We get away with all kinds of expressions that make absolutely no sense at all until you get an explanation from an etymologist (or someone who just googled it, because as everyone knows, they know everything).

FAST ASLEEP

So why? The only times you should be fast asleep are either in a bunk on a night train or when you take a nap in a car (make sure you’re not the one driving before you execute this action).

It comes from the Germanic root meaning “fixed”, which in fact is most likely an offshoot of the same origin, albeit through Latin. In Old Norse, fast originally meant the same: “quickly” or “swiftly”, and also “close to” or “almost”, but after some time, the meaning expanded to include “firmly” or “vigorously”. This is because when you go fast in a race, you are keeping up with the leaders, and therefore sticking to them.

But remember, they didn’t have a concept of speed like we do – speed was enabled either by horses, or by falling in a straight line from a cliff or tower. If you consider the idea of going quickly meant you were probably hunting or being hunted, the analogy starts to make sense.

The most probable origin is that of a hunter or horse rider keeping up with his/her target or competitor. Both travelling fast and “sticking” to the other. So the idea of being “fast asleep” is that you are figuratively glued to slumber and cannot be woken up.

Coupled with this, the word fast in German means “nearly”, again giving the impression that something is close to the end or even imminent.

This double-idea of “fast” is manifested in the expression “fast approaching”. The word fast in this sense can be interpreted as either time passing quickly or something that will inevitably and remorselessly reach its climax or conclusion, therefore fixed.

 

FASTEN YOUR SEATBELTS

So when the pilot on an aircraft says “please fasten your seatbelts”, they are saying “affix yourself firmly to the seat”. And here we get the whole picture: at some point the ideas of “firmly” and “vigorously” got blended with “quickly”, probably through things like the Old Norse expression “drekka fast”, meaning “drink hard”, in other words knock back some ale as quickly as you can as if it was an obligation. You can find an explanation of the -en suffix further down this article.

 

GERMANIC EXPRESSIONS

Some expressions from other languages can corroborate this:

German:

Festmachen (fast + make) = to secure / to attach / to tighten / to fasten

Befestigen = to couple / to install / to attach / to moor

Eine Freundschaft festigen = to cement a friendship

Wasserfest = water-tight / water-resistant

Festlegen = to determine something / to define something / to establish (e.g. a fact)

Dutch:

Vast = firm, tight

Vastzitten (fast + sit) = to be stuck

Vasthouden (fast + hold) = hold on tight to something

Alvast = in advance / already (therefore inevitable)

 

Danish:

Fastsætte = to fix / set a value to something

Fastansat = permanently employed

 

FASTING PERIOD

When we forgo food and drink, it is known as fasting (verb: fast). But why? Well, this is also linked to the above: in the deep, dark days of the Germanic languages, fast had the concept of holding firmly to something, or faithfully observing a particular ritual. So then this also has some logic to it When we fast, we have firm control of ourselves, and we are holding on to our beliefs through the observance of this ritual.

Fasting therefore has the same concept as being fast asleep: both are “sticking” to their meanings.

BREAKFAST

This brings us nicely on to the word breakfast. This of course signifies exactly breaking your fast, so eating after your night’s sleep. But it wasn’t always that way – up until quite late, in fact, it was called morgenmete, or “morning meat” (in Danish it is still morgenmad). This is because a morning (pre-noon) meal was a rarity in some parts of Europe, so a morning meal was consumed as an exception, possibly to give strength before a journey or a battle.

Take, for example, the French “déjeuner” (dé = to go the other way from + jeuner = to fast) is actually lunch. This stems from the Latin verb disjejunare (jejunus = barren, dry, meagre), in other words to end the dry period. In France they ate for the first time around noon (of course, nothing to do with the French stereotype work ethic, I am sure…) but once the idea of eating earlier took hold, it was called “petit-déjeuner”, therefore “little breakfast”. If you have seen what the French eat in the morning (I use the word “eat” loosely), you can see where the “petit” fits in.

Although the Spanish desayuno has the same root, almuerzo is generally accepted to mean “lunch”, but this is not universal in the Spanish-speaking world. Almuerzo has the Arabic prefix al- that is very common to Spanish, plus morzar, from mordere, meaning “to bite”. And the German Frühstück, which means “early bit”, gets an honourable mention here. But then we see the Dutch ontbijt (ont- = prefix same as un- + bijt = bite), it maybe has the concept of unclenching one’s mouth, or again, breaking a fast. With Spanish and Dutch having similar meanings, I wonder if there is a connection through the former's colonisation of the Low Lands.

OTHER VARIANTS:

Handfasting

In the distant past, it was common for two people to promise each other in marriage through an official ceremony known as handfasting. This came from the Nordic idea of shaking hands to seal a deal, but was adapted in English society for a betrothal to your promised one. It lives on in modern-day Pagan circles to signify a coming-together of two loved ones through the ancient tradition of wrapping and tying a cloth around the couple’s conjoined hands and declaring their intentions.

Steadfast

The word stead, which lives on in words like instead, means “place”, is often found in word compounds and collocations, one of them being steadfast, which does exactly what it says: fixed in position. It means someone who is resolute and consistent in his/her beliefs or is unshakable in matters of principle.

 

-EN SUFFIX

Fasten is one of many verbs that contain the -en ending. This is probably the most Germanic thing English does: amongst other things, the -en ending in Dutch and German can signify verb infinitives, and any lingering verbs in English generally signify that someone has done something to another person or an object, e.g. darken, weaken, lengthen, cheapen, straighten, enlighten, hearten, tighten, frighten, sharpen, sweeten, etc.

 

ROUND-UP

So this is why “fast” means two opposing things, known as a contranym. Lots of words do this in English – other languages too, but not as much. This is because over the years English has homed in on some single acceptable spellings and pronunciations. It has broken down the much larger number of variants of similar words and arranged them into these blocks of words with the same spelling or pronunciation but different meanings, which can only be identified by the rest of the sentence or the overall context of the text or dialogue. This started at the arrival of the printing press back in Tudor times and quickly transformed the way we speak and write the language. Despite only a little over a century and a half between them, the English of Shakespeare (b. 1564) is closer to our English today than it is to Chaucer’s (d. 1400). But that’s for another time.

Raymond Goslitski