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:
“We have got rid of the fetish of the divine right of kings, and that slavery is of divine origin and authority. But the divine right of property has taken its place. The tendency plainly is towards ... “a government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich.””
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“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)