Comment

Marc Cooper: The Devolution of PJ Media

82
tradewind7/07/2010 6:04:30 pm PDT

re: #51 Boogberg
Don’t worry, your usage was correct. The objecting poster evidently stopped googling at the sixteenth century, because

By the 1590s an idiom to keep good quarters with had grown up, meaning to have good relations with a person, presumably a reference to the need to stay on good terms with those living with or around you — Shakespeare used it in The Comedy of Errors in 1590 in a way that showed he was having fun with an expression already well known. So to give no quarter might have meant “don’t show any friendliness to the enemy”.


worldwidewords.org