A scene from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight that makes one blush; Lady Bertilak in Gawain’s bedchamber
16 January 2023
The idiom at first blush means upon first sight or by initial and cursory examination. Like most idioms, it does not make literal sense anymore as blush, in Present-Day English, relates to the color red, in particular to the reddening of the face through either embarrassment or cosmetics. But in this case, the history of the term makes sense of the phrase.
The verb to blush can be traced back to the Old English ablysian. That verb appears some fifteen times in the extant Old English corpus, usually in glosses of Latin psalters. For instance, there is this tenth century gloss of Psalms 6:11:
ablysigen ł scamien & syn drefed ealle fynd mine syn gecerred on hinder & aswarnien swiþe hredlice ł anunga
(Let all my enemies blush / be ashamed & be troubled, let them be turned back & be confounded very quickly / rapidly)
Ablysian here glosses the Latin erubescent, to redden, to blush, to be ashamed.
There is also a single appearance of the verb blysian in the corpus, with the meaning of to flare or burn. Not only does the flame associate the word with the color red, but this form may be the source of our modern verb to blaze. The word’s sole appearance in the extant Old English corpus is in the prose translation of the Psalms that are commonly attributed to King Alfred the Great, which if the attribution is correct would date the composition to the late ninth century, although the surviving manuscript is from the tenth century. From the Old English prose translation of Psalms 17:8:
For þam astah smec for his yrre, and fyr blysede beforan his ansyne
(So smoke rose up because of his ire, and fire blazed before his face.)
The Vulgate uses the verb exardescet, to flare, to blaze
The sense meaning to shine or burn survived as the Middle English blishen, but the sense fell out of use by the Early Modern period.
But in Middle English, in addition to the continued use of blishen to mean to redden, to blush, we also see the verb used to mean to look or gaze at something. This use probably arose out of the optical theory that vision is enabled by beams of light emitted, or blazed forth, from the eyes. For instance, we see the verb used in the sense of to look in the fourteenth-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in the passage where Gawain first encounters Sir Bertilak’s castle:
Þe walle wod in þe water wonderly depe
Ande eft a ful huge heȝt hit haled vpon lofte,
Of harde hewen ston vp to þe tablez,
Enbaned vnder þe abataylment, in þe best lawe;
And syþen garytez ful gaye gered bitwene,
Wyth mony luflych loupe þat louked ful clene;
A better barbican þat burne blusched vpon neuer.(The wall waded wondrously deep into the water
And likewise it stretched aloft a very great height,
Of hard hewn stone up to the corbels,
Furnished with parapets under the battlement in the best fashion;
And followed by richly equipped garrets in between,
With many lovely loopholes with clear lines of sight;
A better barbican that knight had never blushed upon.)
And this sense of blush is how we get the phrase at first blush, in other words at first glance. The phrase itself appears by the late sixteenth century in an anti-Puritan tract written by Stephen Bredwell, who was a medical student at the time and who would go on to become better known for his medical treatises. The 1586 tract critiques a purportedly anonymous, radical Puritan text written by an Edward Glover, of whom little is known and whose identity is only known because Bredwell identified him. Bredwell writes:
In the rest of this diuision he hath promised to stand vpon two points. 1. To reconsile some scriptures which seeme at first blush to say the contrarie. 2. To shew what difference the holy Ghost maketh betweene the inner man of the good, and the inner man of the bad.
Although the sense of the verb meaning to look or to gaze became obsolete, the phrase at first blush became fossilized as an idiom. This sense of blush had largely fallen out of use by the time Bredwell wrote the above passage, so it is highly unlikely that Bredwell coined the phrase. Perhaps as more sixteenth-century works become digitized, earlier uses will be found.
Sources:
Andrew, Malcolm and Ronald Waldron, eds. The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, fourth edition. Exeter: U of Exeter Press, 2002, 237, lines 787–93. London, British Library, Cotton MS Nero A.x.
Bredwell, Stephen.51. Detection of Ed. Glouers Hereticall Confection. London: John Wolfe, 1586, Early English Books Online.
Dictionary of Old English: A to I, 2018, s.v. blysian, v., a-blysian, v.
Middle English Dictionary, 2019, blishen, v.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. blush, n. and adj., blush, v.
Psalms 6:11. Roeder, Fritz, ed. Der Altenglische Regius-Psalter. Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1904, 8. London, British Library, MS Royal 2.B.5. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Psalms 17:8. O’Neill, Patrick, ed. Old English Psalms. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 42. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2016, 52. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, fonds Latin MS 8824.
Image credit: London, British Library, Cotton MS Nero A.x, fol. 129r. Public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a public domain work.