"Truant" comes from a Celtic word meaning "wretched." When the word was first used in English, a "truant" was a beggar. But not just any beggar: it -was a term of abuse for an able-bodied person who you thought could be making an honest living instead of panhandling.
Our first evidence of the word is a statement that people thought St. Francis of Assisi was a "truant" (1209).
From the 1300s to the 1600s, it was a general form of abuse for someone perceived as being lazy, and. It was applied to children skipping school as early as the 1,400s.
No comments:
Post a Comment