Origin
In this context, the word wife means woman rather than married woman. This usage stems from Old English wif (woman) and is akin to the German Weib, also meaning "woman". This sense of the word is still used in Modern English in constructions such as midwife and fishwife.
Most old wives' tales are false and are used to discourage unwanted behavior, usually in children, or for folk cures for ailments ranging from a toothache to dysentery. Among the few tales with grains of truth, the veracity is likely coincidental.
The concept of old wives' tales is ancient. In the 1st century, the Apostle Paul wrote to his young protégé Timothy, "But refuse profane and old wives' fables, and exercise thyself unto godliness" (I Timothy 4:7 KJV).
Read more about this topic: Old Wives' Tale
Famous quotes containing the word origin:
“Someone had literally run to earth
In an old cellar hole in a byroad
The origin of all the family there.
Thence they were sprung, so numerous a tribe
That now not all the houses left in town
Made shift to shelter them without the help
Of here and there a tent in grove and orchard.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“The real, then, is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of me and you. Thus, the very origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of a COMMUNITY, without definite limits, and capable of a definite increase of knowledge.”
—Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)
“Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity. Their result is absolutely nil. They give us, now and then, some of those luxurious sterile emotions that have a certain charm for the weak.... They are simply cheques that men draw on a bank where they have no account.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)