Here’s a complex case of slipshod extension.
In British English one of the words in the title when spoken described an effeminate man. A man who was a homosexual was a ‘fairy’ (pejorative). However fey is an Old English adjective with a completely different meaning and fay a Middle English noun.
Old English is distinguished from Middle English by being that spoken before the Norman Conquest of Britain, after which there was a large number of French borrowings, including fay. But English is a Germanic language and the word fey in its first spelling was fæge.
Originally fey carried the sense of being in ‘an excited state before death’. But in the early 1800s it began to also mean ‘mentally deranged’ until through slipshod extension, the meaning rested on ‘whimsical’, and ‘magical’ or ‘fairy-like’ (see Garner at 384 and Fowler at 295), as well as the original meaning (see below). In a sense, fay qualifies now as the noun and fey its adjective. My dictionaries differ slightly, yet this is indeed the case: MW11 at 457, lists five meanings for fay including the noun ‘fairy, elf’ and the adjectival ‘resembling an elf’; at 464, several definitions—all adjectivals for fey, including ‘fated to die’, ‘quaintly unconventional’, plus an adverb: feyly, meaning ‘campy’ [sic]. At 519, OED12 defines fay only as a noun meaning ‘fairy’ (this is consistent with Garner: ‘Fay . . . is always a noun’ p. 384), used typically in literary fiction and poetry; fey is defined as an adjective in two senses: ‘giving an impression of vague unworldliness’ and, ‘having clairvoyant powers’ (526). Oxford also lists feyly (adv) as well as feyness (n), but doesn’t define them.
An ngram search between 1500 and 2019 shows the adjective fey to not having ever been an especially popular word in print presumably because its meaning was, until relatively recently, distinct in referring to ‘the emotion one feels shortly before death’ and therefore peculiar to an extremely limited usage in print. As a noun, fay, shows no significant usage until 1530 and then begins an erratic climb in frequency with a sudden peak in 1652 with an upward trending sawtooth pattern until 1711 when the word’s appearance in print begins to decline. By 1820 the frequency of fay had sunk back to a level unknown in three hundred years. Since the ngram viewer is a Google large-language data base and cannot be seen as precise for a five-hundred-year time-span, the reader should make their own judgement.
But what stuck with me might stick with you: the original meaning of an ancient word describing the emotional state before death, and, how does anyone know?
References
Bryan A. Garner, Garner’s Modern English Usage (2016).
Merriam-Websters Collegiate Dictionary.11th ed. (2003)
Concise Oxford English Dictionary. 12 ed. (2011)
