Say Your Piece (or Hold Your Peace)

Today we’re going to talk about the right word to use in a common expression: “to say your piece.”

This came up recently in the workplace of our guest writer Samantha Enslen.

Sam assures us that she never fights with her coworkers. But one day she was having a teeny disagreement with her colleague Magi via chat. Sam stated her point; Magi stated hers. Then, Magi wrote “I’ve said my peace.” P-E-A-C-E.

Sam chatted back, “I think you mean ‘I’ve said my PIECE.’” P-I-E-C-E.

Now the fight was really on.

What’s interesting, Sam discovered, is that both women were thinking of real sayings. There are two expressions—one uses “peace” with an “ea,” and the other uses “piece” with an “ie.” But their meanings are very different. 

Speak Your Piece

The first expression is to “speak one’s piece" or “to say one’s piece”—spelled P-I-E-C-E. This means to say what you think and then announce that you’ve done so. 

For example, if you were arguing with a friend over the merits of Star Trek versus Star Wars, you might explain your point and then say, “I’ve said my piece.” In other words, you’ve said everything you have to say on the subject. Now it’s up to your friend to make her own decision.

This word “piece” in this expression alludes to a memorized poem or speech, the kind you might have made in elementary school. It first appeared in print in the early 1800s. 

This phrase calls to mind the expression to “give someone a piece of your mind,” but the two are unrelated. The latter one dates back to the 1500s, and the “piece” here simply means a “portion.” Note that the portion of the mind in this phrase is always negative. You only give someone “a piece of your mind” when you’re angry and ready to share some fierce criticism.   

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Hold Your Peace

The second expression is to “hold one’s peace” or to “keep one’s peace”—spelled P-E-A-C-E. This is the near-opposite of the previous phrase; it means to keep quiet.

For example, if your friend insisted that Star Wars was superior—and you were tired of arguing about it—you might “hold your peace” and simply say “you’re right.”

You’ve probably heard this expression in traditional Christian wedding ceremonies. The person officiating usually says something like this:

Into this union these two people now come to be joined. If anyone can show just cause why they may not be lawfully wed, speak now or forever hold your peace.

In other words, if you got a problem with these two getting married, now’s the time to say it.

Hold Your Tongue … and a Bit About King Alfred

“Hold your peace” was first seen in writing in 1250. But a variation of this phrase, to “hold one’s tongue,” goes back much farther. The first recorded use was in a book called “Gregory’s Pastoral Care.” This was written by Pope Gregory I around the year 590 and translated into Old English by King Alfred The Great in 897. 

Let’s take a moment to say that Alfred was a pretty cool guy. He was king of the Wessex region at the time the Vikings were raiding England. As part of their onslaught, the Vikings regularly destroyed monasteries—and all of the books within them. At the time, monasteries were not only religious centers, but also centers of learning—somewhat like the maesters’ Citadel in Game of Thrones.

Alfred saw that this destruction was eating away at literacy and learning. In his introduction to “Pastoral Care,” he wrote that “so general was its [Latin’s] decay in England that there were very few on this side of the Humber who could understand their rituals in English or translate a letter from Latin into English ... so few that I cannot remember a single one south of the Thames when I came to the throne.”

In response, he began to translate books from Latin into Anglo-Saxon (aka Old English), and he recruited a group of scholars to help him. He chose books he thought it “most needful for men to know, and to bring it to pass ... if we have the peace, that all the youth now in England ... may be devoted to learning.”

In short, Alfred was an early proponent of translating important texts from Latin into English, so they could be understood by a broader range of people. So that more people could read—and learn how to read.

(A side note: this seems like a simple idea, but in the United States, the Catholic Mass was spoken in Latin all the way up to 1964.)

OK! After a couple small detours, we’ll wrap this segment up. We talked about two phrases: speak your piece, with an “ie,” and hold your peace, with an “ea.” The first means to say what you think. The second means to keep your opinion to yourself.

Samantha Enslen runs Dragonfly Editorial. You can find her at dragonflyeditorial.com or @DragonflyEdit.

Sources

Ammer, Christine. Hold one’s tongue, piece of one’s mind, speak one’s piece. American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms, 2nd ed. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013. 

Oxford English Dictionary, online edition. Oxford University Press. Hold one’s peace, hold one’s tongue, speak one’s piece,  (subscription required, accessed March 6, 2018).

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