"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 06/09/17 (Short shrift)

I had a few e-mails in asking me for the origin of "short shrift". It's quiet hard to say. What is a shrift?  If you give someone short shrift, you don't really pay much attention to them. In fact, you are quite curt to them, usually. It gose back a very, very long way, to at least the late 16th century and William Shakespeare, unsurprisingly, who seem to have coined ir in his play Richard III. And shrift was based on a verb "to shrive" but that ultimately goes all the way back to the Latin verb scribere which meant to write.  That given us scripture, script, scribe, etc. But shrive originally had a very specific, religious meaning of to hear the confession of a penitent. So it was to prescribe penance to somebody - presumably in writing, which is a link - and to grant absolution. So, over the the years, the noun srift has ment to confession, the sentence of penance, and the absolution itself. And. of course, we keep that word for Shrove Tuesday. Shrove is the past tense of shrive, and that's the day before Ash Wednesday in the Christian calendar, which is traditionaly time of confession and absolution. But by Shakespeare's time, it has settled a little bit to mean the opportunity to confess and to be absolved of sin, but specifically before punishment, which was usually a death sentence. So, in Richard III, Lord Hastings, who's about to be beheaded on the King's orders, says, "Make a short shrift, he longs to see your head". In other words, the King is impatient for his execution. So very, very grisly. He was the first, Shakespeare, who use "short shrift" in than sense. Then flew below the radar, actuallly, for a very, very long time, only to re-emerge later with a slightly different meaning, and it's the one that we know today, a bit less grisly, which is a brief and superficial consideration, as I say, and maybe with a stroke of impatience involved there too, just as the King's inpatience for the beheading of a subject. But all traces of penance now have gone, except in Shrove Tuesday, and it says there still.