Talk:Apple of my eye

message: Anyone who knows Old English, please try for a better (more literal) translation of King Alfred's text.
Explanations of etymology and phrases often sound a bit dubious; but without refs for the interpretations, a lot of this article seems like original research.  Citations please. 79.70.116.165 (talk) 07:42, 9 May 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Yeah, this whole section seems in error. First, the citation should not be of Zechariah 2:8, but 2:12 where בַבַת–עֵינוֹ occurs. Also, the discussion of the meaning of אִישׁוֹן flies in the face of Brown, Driver, Briggs (BDB) and HALOT lexicons, both of which attribute the term's origins to a diminutive from אִישׁ, with cognates listed from Arabic. BOTH of these Hebrew uses seem drawn from the same ultimate idea: the reflection of a human being in the eye looks like a small person, a child or baby. Indeed, the use of אישן at Psalm 17:8 even glosses the term in the Masoretic Hebrew test: כְּאִשׁוֹן בַּת–עָיִן "like a pupil, daughter of [the] eye." There are uses of the word, such as at Proverbs 7:9 and 20:20, where the inability of eyes to see in darkness is emphasized, but more than the likely the usage there is a transferred epithet from the word for pupil. In his etymological dictionary, Isidore of Seville (AD 560-636, Etymologiae V.xxxi.1)included in his gloss on the Latin word nox or "night" the folk etymology that it derived from the verb nocere "to harm" because "night harms the eyes," making it impossible to see. This erroneous idea probably stems from the same transference as the Proverbs passages. 2600:1700:59EB:AA00:E452:4548:A4D6:18DC (talk) 13:39, 4 February 2023 (UTC)
thread_title: Untitled

message: Clearly Apple of one's eye covers the same subject matter as this article and should be merged into it. – ukexpat (talk) 12:49, 26 April 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Merge discussion

message: This article is a mess. AmericanLeMans (talk) 18:23, 24 October 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Cleanup 

message: How can this be good quality? It's a true mess. The article gives no sense of the use of apple as a term for pupil, yet this is the whole crux. This is not original research, it is a simple matter of looking it up in the OED. Apple as a term for the pupil begins in old english, and it continues to occur as a reference that readers will understand through the 19th century; it not until the 20th cent. that it is clearly a historical term.  "Apple" thus PREDATES the word "pupil", which has one questionable 15th century example, but otherwise dates from late 16th cent.
From the title, the article seems to want to claim that "apple of my eye" is an idiom, meaning "something precious to me"; but since apple is the original word in English for pupil, the original meaning of the phrase is simply that the pupil is the most valuable part of the eye; if this is a metaphor, it goes back to Deuteronomy, and is used throughout the Old Testament.  Everyone else, in Latin, English, French, German, or whatever, is just borrowing this biblical sense.
What is the point of even putting this sort of etymological stuff in an encyclopedia? Another article written to win a bar room bet. Rgr09 (talk) 18:05, 5 June 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Quality good?? 

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message: So what does it simply mean. I need to know 2A03:2880:30FF:16:0:0:FACE:B00C (talk) 23:34, 15 February 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Apple of my eye