Time and time again

We know that this phrase and its alternative version ‘time and again’ mean ‘repeatedly’, or ‘once and again’; but it is not easy to see how or why. Nor do the ‘Phrase and Fable’ dictionaries, or the standard dictionaries for that matter, offer much in the way of explanation.

The problem seems to be that we don’t use the simple word ‘time’ to mean ‘once’: if we did, there would be no doubt in the matter.

The solution may lie in the close relationship of the two words ‘time’ and ‘tide’ (both of which, as we all know, wait for no man). The words have the same ancient root of ti, but with different (and again, pretty ancient) terminations. Old English used both tima and tid to mean simple ‘time’ and also the notion of repetition in time. Over the centuries it was the tid derivative 'tide' that came to mean both regular seasonal festivals (‘Christmastide’, ‘Eastertide’) and the regular rise and fall of the sea (‘high tide’, ‘low tide’).

We get a hint of the dual significance of ‘tide’ in a well-known passage in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar:

“There is a tide in the affairs of men”, declares Brutus rather over-optimistically, “Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune . . . On such a full sea we are now afloat, And we must take the current when it serves . . . ”

But it seems that the notion of regularity also lingered in the word that became our ‘time’. In our phrase ‘time and time again’, it is the notion of regular repetition, which we associate usually with the word ‘tide’, that is alluded to in what may be a very old English idiom.

Time and time again