“Hale and hearty” means being in good health and comes from Old English. It is an alliterative couplet and cannot be reversed. The phrase is recognizable to most English speakers and is used as a trademark for some businesses.
The phrase “hale and hearty” is an idiomatic English expression used to describe a person who is in good health. It is often used to refer to an elderly person who has survived old age with their health and fitness intact, or a person who might not otherwise be expected to be in good health. It can also be used to refer by analogy to things other than people, such as ideas or institutions.
The term “hale and hearty” comes from Old English, the language spoken in England before the end of the 11th century. In Old English, the word “hal” means “safe” or “unharmed.” It is the root of the modern English words “whole” and “heal”, as well as “health” and “hail”. The modern English word “hale,” meaning fit and healthy, is derived from this root, but is now rarely used.
The word “brave” first appears in the 14th century and is used to mean “witty” or “brave”. In the Middle Ages it was thought that the heart was the seat of feelings. Consequently, a wide variety of English terms refer to the heart in this way. Examples include “hard hearted,” “heard,” and “heartbroken.” Being “heartfelt,” therefore, means having a strong heart and being in a good mood.
The combination of these two terms in the expression “healthy and vigorous” gives a picture of an individual who is both in good physical condition – healthy – and also vigorous and full of life, or vigorous. The expression is one of a series of alliterative couplets commonly used in English. Other examples of such conventional matings include “rack and ruin,” “safe and sound,” “thick and lean,” “bright eyes and bushy tail,” friend or foe, and others. In linguistics, these types of sentences are known as “irreversible pairs” (or, informally, as “Siamese twins”) because the order of the pair cannot be reversed. No native English speaker would say “hearty and hale” instead of “hale and hearty,” any more than he or she would say “foe or friend?”
Because of its prevalence in common parlance, “hale and hearty” is recognizable to most English speakers, even if “hale” is not in common usage. This ease of recognition gives the phrase value to advertisers. Consequently, this phrase is a trademark for a number of different businesses, mainly restaurants and other food manufacturers.
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