The quick and the dead (idiom)
The Quick and the Dead is an English phrase originating in William Tyndale's English translation of the New Testament (1526), "I testifie therfore before god and before the lorde Iesu Christ which shall iudge quicke and deed at his aperynge in his kyngdom" [2 Tim 4:1], and used by Thomas Cranmer his translation of the Nicene Creed and Apostles' Creed for the first Book of Common Prayer (1540). In the following century the idiom was referenced both by Shakespeare's Hamlet (1603) and the King James Bible (1611).
The use of the word quick in this context is an archaic one. Here, the word specifically means living or alive (a meaning still retained in the idiom quickening, as the moment in pregnancy when fetal movements are first felt, and in the "quick" of the fingernails. Another common phrase, "cut to the quick", literally means cut through the dead, unfeeling layers of the skin to the living, sensitive tissues below.Quicksilver, an old name for the liquid metal mercury, refers to the way droplets of mercury run around and quiver as if alive. It is derived from the Proto-Germanic *kwikwaz, which in turn was from a variant of the Proto-Indo-European form *gwih3wos – "lively, alive", from the root *gweih3 – "(to) live" (from which also comes the Latin vivere and later the Italian and Spanish viva, and whose root is retained in the English words revive and survive).
The English meaning of "quick" in later centuries shifted to "fast", "rapid", "moving, or able to move, with speed".
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