👉 Okay, alright settle down now! Let’s tackle this wee little bit of linguistic weirdness: the wonderfully obnoxious, frankly rather aggressively specific, and historically… prickly… word, " defray."
Now, before you immediately think I'm messing with you, let me assure you. This ain’t just a random shouting into the face of the uncouth. The frankly depressing origin of “ defray'’ lies in 16th-century early modern English. Originally it meant to diminish, subtract, lose . Picture this: ye were spending your lordly shillings on a fancy doublet and a pheasant, then the year's bad harvest and a bit of plague would just… defray your expenses, right out from under you! You went from looking splendid to, frankly, very poor. The spelling got fancier with it, a whole bunch of arrows and slashes, because it was already feeling like this word was on the verge of disappearing altogether. That then morphed into its current state which is pretty damn odd. Essentially, you use it now when something that was previously there simply... vanishes from account. There are no good terms to replace it - the way we would say "the losses were substantial" a defray is more like “the money was spent on things of little value and then just went away.” It’s not terribly pretty, I grant you. The sound itself has a kind of weary resignation in it, like old Bess, after losing all
