Don't fret

My choir recently sang a quite lovely motet, "Lord, let me know mine end" by C.H.H. Parry, set to the words of the 39th Psalm. I found this simile, in the translation dating from the 1500s, particularly striking: "When thou with rebukes dost chasten man for sin, thou makest his beauty to consume away, like as it were a moth fretting a garment", which got me thinking about the word "fret" (I should probably have been thinking about whether I was singing the right note!) You can hear the whole piece here:

with the "fretting" at 6:06, where Parry very cleverly conveys musically the image of a moth's wings fluttering while it gnaws on the garment.

But what about the word "fret"? Old English had two words for "eat": etan for people and fretan for animals (Modern German still makes this distinction between essen and fressen). We English speakers stopped making the distinction, so that by the 1600s people, animals, birds, worms, and moths were all eating rather than "fretting".

But back in the 1200s we had started using "fret" figuratively, of the "gnawing" or "consuming" effect of what one author called "vexatious passions" (love, anger, etc.) on the mind. "Rage frets her bones," wrote one Renaissance author. One could also "fret oneself" with such feelings, or with worry. From there it was a short step to the current intransitive use, where we fret about something.

The guitarists among you will be wondering about the noun "fret", but this is unrelated, coming from an Old French word meaning "ring".

If you want to hear my choir, you can check out the podcasts here:
http://stthomas.on.ca/services-podcasts
where eventually the recent service will turn up. That'll be me singing the wrong note on "fretting"! (Actually I did sing the right note, so do pay attention to the exquisite altos.)