Why do we say . . . that a person who is a stirling example of whatever it is that he or she does well (usually something good or admirable) is a [insert domain in which the person excels: friend, prince, storyteller, copy editor, etc.)] of the first water?

I used the expression myself earlier this month, when I described an old buddy of mine as a friend of the first water. I knew exactly what I meant, and so did the person I was speaking to, but I didn't know why the expression means what it means. I remembered that Robertson Davies (the novelist, man of the theatre, and one of my professors at the University of Toronto) explained the expression to me and a few others many years ago, and I vaguely recalled that it had something to do with jewellry, but for the life of me I could not remember what: in those days my head was being stuffed with so many interesting facts that some of them fell right out again! So I looked it up.

As it turned out, it was not difficult to track down the origin of this particular expression: all sources but one (see below) agree that it comes from a classification system that was once used to describe the clarity of precious stones, particularly diamonds: diamonds that were absolutely clear and colourless were said to be of the first water, those that were ever so slighly cloudy or tinted of the second water, and so on down until one came to coloured stones. The same scale was used to classify pearls according to lustre, with the brightest and shiniest being described as "of the first water" and decreasing amounts of lustre being describesd as of the second water, etc. The use of water as a standard of clarity and purity is easy enough to understand. Think of the old days when heating bath-water was a time- and energy-consuming chore and it often happened that several people (members of a family, for example) bathed in the same water, often determining precedence by drawing lots: the person fortunate enough to be the first bather had sparkling, clear, and completely colourless water, but with each successive bather the water became murkier and murkier . . .

Today, of course, the expression just means of the very finest quality. The OED has traced it back to 1773, but according to the Phrase Finder Web site, it can be pushed back another twenty years, to the 1753 edition of Chambers' Encyclopedia. The discussion section of the same Web site, however, offers the only dissenting explanation of the phrase from that given above: on September 19, 2002, a poster who identified himself only as TheFallen posted the following comment: "I believe you may be mistaken in your explanation. I believe it relates to the making of mead. Originally, the honeycombs were washed after the initial recovery of liquid honey and the resulting honey/water mixture was fermented. The [highest] quality mead came from the first washing, or first water, with subsequent washings producing an inferior brew."

What a wonderful explanation: one almost wishes that it were accurate. The facts, however, do not support it. Mead was the preferred alcoholic tipple of the Vikings and of their Anglo-Saxon relatives. It was indeed made from a fermented mixture of honey and water, and tasted rather like a sweetish beer (I have sampled a modern version, claimed to be based on ancient recipes, in Uppsala, Sweden). But the manufacture of this drink could not have been the origin of the phrase. Mead brewing goes back to the days of ancient India, some one and a half millennia before the modern era. Its heyday in England was around the time of the epic poem Beowulf, somewhere around AD 700. If it had contributed the expression "of the first water" to the language, one might reasonably expect that the expression would take consideraby less time than one-to-three millennia to appear in print! It is a folk etymology, in other words: one that bears a great deal of similarity to the true origin of the phrase, but one that is, nevertheless, an invention of the first water!

If you have a suggestion for a future posting, please leave me a MySpace message or get it to me any other way you can think of!