Question: I am interested in the usage of “even” in this context: “Bill knows it’s the right thing to do. Even Tom knows it’s the right thing to do.” It appears that the use of “even” implies that our expectations for Tom are lower than for Bill. How does “even” convey this?
Answer: The adverb “even” in this case signifies a particular or exceptional instance within a more common one. In the examples you provided, “Bill knows it’s the right thing to do” represents the typical situation, while “Even Tom knows it’s the right thing to do” depicts the exceptional one.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “even” is employed as an adverb “to indicate that the subject under discussion is an extreme case compared to a weaker or more general one mentioned or implied in the surrounding context.”
The earliest documented use of “even” in this manner is from “The Obedience of a Christen Man” (1528) by the Protestant translator and reformer William Tyndale:
“All secrets know they [the Roman Catholic hierarchy], even the very thoughts of men’s hearts.” Tyndale likely refers to secrets revealed in confession.
(Tyndale’s work is believed to have influenced Henry VIII’s decision in 1534 to break away from Rome and establish the Church of England. Tyndale, arrested in the Netherlands, was executed for heresy in 1536.)
The most recent citation in the dictionary for “even” used in this special sense is from Time Out New York (Jan. 18, 2007): “Even the newest New Yorker knows that the furthest eastern border of Greenwich Village is Fourth Avenue.”
Although English is thought to have inherited “even” from prehistoric Germanic languages, the OED notes that this particular use of the term to denote an exceptional occurrence “is not found in other Germanic languages.”
When “even” first appeared in Old English, it functioned as an adjective, “emn,” meaning “level, smooth, uniform,” as per the OED. In the initial citation, it appears as “emnum,” the dative form of “emn”:
“Seo burg wæs getimbred an fildum lande & on swiþe emnum” (“The city was built in a field and on very level ground”). From the Old English Orosius, a late 9th- or early 10th-century translation of Paulus Orosius’s Historiarum Adversum Pagano Libri VII (Seven Books of History Against the Pagans).
When the adverb “even” emerged in Old English as “efnast,” it similarly denoted “steadily, smoothly; uniformly, regularly,” according to the OED. The first instance is from Psalm 118:77 in the Paris Psalter:
“Me is metegung on modsefan, hu ic æ þine efnast healde” (“For me a modest mind is how I faithfully [i.e., regularly] keep your commandments”).
The adverb retains these meanings today, but how did it evolve to describe something exceptional—something that is both odd and even?
The OED explains that this usage is a “natural development” from a now-obsolete Old English use of “even” (spelled “efne”) to introduce, among other things, “a qualifying circumstance,” with the meaning of “namely,” “that is to say,” or “truly.”
The earliest citation in the dictionary is from “Guthlac B,” an Old English poem about the death of St. Guthlac of Croyland, a hermit in the Anglian Kingdom of Mercia. The poem is based on “Vita Sancti Guthlaci” (Life of Guthlac), an 8th-century Latin work by Felix of Crowland, an East Anglian monk:
“He fyrngewyrht fyllan sceolde þurh deaðes cyme, domes hleotan, efne þæs ilcan þe ussa yldran fyrn frecne onfengon” (“He must accept his fate to gain glory through the coming of death, even [that is to say] the same fate our parents of old accepted”).
While the OED traces the use of “even” to introduce an exceptional occurrence back to this Old English usage, it acknowledges that the exceptional sense of the adverb “appears not to have emerged before the 16th century, and took time to become fully established.”
For further reading, we have written posts in 2017 and 2020 that explore some of the other meanings of the word “even.”
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