Obsequiosity

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

The quality of being excessively eager to please or obedient is referred to as a servile demeanor that often reflects an insincere, ingratiating attitude towards others
This term describes the state of showing an overwhelming readiness to serve, which can be perceived as fawning or sycophantic behavior
It denotes a manner characterized by an exaggerated deference or submission to others, often aimed at gaining favor or approval

Etymology: In the second scene of Hamlet, Claudius tells the prince that a son is bound “In filliall obligation” to mourn, “To doe obsequious sorrowe”. He is not calling his nephew a flatterer. The fawning sense, the bowing and the hand-rubbing, is on record only from 1602, two years before the Second Quarto was printed in 1604. In Shakespeare’s day the word could also describe a mourner attending to obsequies, the rites of the dead. That funeral sense is on record from 1594 to 1681, and the OED files Claudius’s line under it. The whole family descends from Latin “sequi”, to follow. Add the prefix “ob-” and “obsequi” meant to follow someone’s lead, to comply. From that came the noun “obsequium”, compliance or deference, and from the noun the adjective “obsequiosus”, compliant and obedient. Terence wrote “obsequium amicos, veritas odium parit”: compliance breeds friends, truth breeds hatred. Latin also had a quite separate word for funeral rites, “exsequiae”, from “exsequi”, to follow out. In the Latin of the Middle Ages “exsequiae” was reshaped into “obsequiae”, probably by confusion with “obsequium”. English took in both the funeral word and the compliance word. “Obsequies”, the funeral rites, came in through Anglo-Norman French and through Latin, and is in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale around 1385, when the bones of the dead are handed back to the women “To doon obsequies”. A second “obsequy”, meaning compliance and translating “obsequium” directly, is on record in a northern version of St Paul’s epistles by the early fifteenth century. In 1483 Caxton used one spelling, “obsequyes”, for both. The English adjective is on record in its obedient sense first, with no funeral in it. The adjective’s own noun, obsequiousness, is on record before it. Bokenham’s lives of the saints, in 1447, have a woman who “shewyd þis meke obsequyousnesse”, and the OED takes that noun as implying the adjective. The adjective itself is on record from around 1475, in the morality play Mankind: “Owr obsequyouse seruyce to hym xulde be aplyede.” Tyndale in 1530 wrote “Was no man so obsequyous and seruiceable”, a use the OED files under the obedient sense. Shakespeare used it that way too: in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff tells Mistress Ford “I see you are obsequious in your loue”. A Vocabulary.com word list has put obsequious among the words Shakespeare is credited with coining or first putting into print. Mankind and Tyndale had it on record decades before he was born. The funeral sense is first on record in Shakespeare. In Titus Andronicus, printed in 1594, a kinsman is told to stand near “To shed obsequious teares vpon this trunke”, and the Second Quarto of Hamlet followed ten years later. Around 1674 a monument in Kingswood church was set up “In memory of his deere Father” by “His obsequious son Richard Webb”, where the word means devoted to the dead and nothing worse. The last example the OED finds is an elegy of 1681. David Crystal, writing on Shakespeare’s vocabulary, calls the funeral sense “a sense related to obsequies”, the funeral rites that had been in English since Chaucer. It is tempting to go a step further and assume that obsequious comes from obsequies. It does not: the adjective was built on “obsequium”, compliance, and the funeral sense came late and did not last. Marston’s Antonio and Mellida, printed in 1602, gives the OED its first example of the fawning sense, “With most obsequious, sleek-brow’d intertain”. Crystal dates that sense as “entering the language in Shakespeare’s time” and finds it in Iago’s scorn for the “knee-crooking knave” who is “doting on his own obsequious bondage”. The obedient sense stayed in use beside the fawning one. The OED now calls the obedient sense rare, but it still files Joyce’s “obsequious policemen” of 1922 under it. Obsequiosity names the quality of being obsequious, and English had older nouns for it. Ben Jonson used “obsequy” in Volpone in 1607, where a man is forced to eat his careful bread “With too much obsequy”. Obsequiousness had been on record since Bokenham, and the OED records a handful more, “obsequence” among them by about 1525. The OED’s label for obsequiosity is literary and rare. “Presently, obsequiosity in thread gloves, with a newspaper in its hand, comes up and bows low.” That sentence, from Harper’s Magazine in January 1878, is the earliest the OED has found, and in it the word is already walking about as a person. Henry James used it in 1884 in “En Province”, the Atlantic Monthly travel pieces that became A Little Tour in France: “His application will be accompanied with the forms of a considerable obsequiosity.” Joseph Conrad found “a suggestion of obsequiosity in his deadened utterance”. In 2001 a writer in the Scotsman, writing of people who “gush”, called for a cull “to stop the spread of the knee-and-nose virus, known in medical circles as diabolicus obsequiosity”. “Formed within English”, the OED says, from obsequious and the ending “-ity”. It then compares the English word with older ones and says no more than that. The Latin of the thirteenth century had “obsequiositas”, obedience or servitude. Middle French had a form of the word in 1504, in the sense of servility, and the modern French “obséquiosité” is on record from 1823.

Synonyms: fawning, servility, sycophancy, ingratiation, subservience

Antonyms: independence, assertiveness, self-respect, confidence, insubordination