Two archaic words come together in this phrase. ‘Gird,’ from the Old English gyrdan, means to put a belt (or girdle) around something. Loins, from the Latin lumbus, originally described the flanks of an animal and, from the fourteenth century, those parts of the human body which, as medieval writers primly put it, ‘should be covered.’
In biblical times, when long robes were still in fashion, anyone embarking on strenuous physical activity or going into battle ran a serious risk of tripping on a trailing hem and falling flat on their face. The solution? To tuck one’s robe into one’s belt, i.e. to gird one’s loins.
The phrase, in this literal sense, occurs frequently in the Bible, starting from the Second Book of Kings. The phrase can also be found in the Bible as a metaphor, in the First Epistle of Peter. ‘Gird up the loins of your mind,’ writes the apostle to his followers—an awkward image, but he got his point across.
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