be associated with the rosary and came to mean В«an ornamental rosary beadВ». Unfortunately, not all who prayed with the rosary were genuinely pious; many were like the Pharisees of old and just wanted to be seen praying - religion for them was decorative (ornamental) rather than functional. As a result, modern English gaudy gradually acquired its current meaning of tasteless or ostentatious ornamentation.related word to gaudy, which is not explicitly referenced in Suffield's poem but is implied, is bead (in the poem, bedead is probably an anagrammatic play on beaded ). In Middle English times, bead (then spelled 'bede') referred only to a rosary bead. Middle English bede was itself descended from Old English gebed, prayer. The phrase telling one's beads was literally В«saying one's prayersВ», with each rosary bead used to keep count of the number of prayers said. In the days when all English-speaking Christians were Catholics, using the rosary was such a common practice that it was only natural for the word for prayer to become the word for the bead used to say a prayer.this way, Suffield is arguing, deep spiritual communication has been trivialized into a trinket. Modern English bead has come so far from its original center that its sphere of meaning no longer includes prayer - but does include other small round objects, such as beads of sweat.word rosary, incidentally, originally was Latin for В«a rose gardenВ», which was applied as a metaphorical description of the prayer cycle, which was В«a rose garden of prayersВ», with the rose garden symbolizing both the Garden of Eden (or paradise, which originally meant, well we could go on forever ...) and the rose of the Virgin Mary.word that has shown similar semantic degeneration to gaudy is tawdry. In the eighth century, AEthelthy/rth, Queen of Northumbria, abdicated her office and renounced the pleasures of the flesh, having her marriage to the King of Northumbria annulled to become abbess of a monastery on the Isle of Ely. This act of sacrifice and her subsequent holiness prompted others to revere her as a saint. Legend has it that she died of a disease of the throat, a disease that she regarded as judgment upon the vanity of her youth, when she loved to wear beautiful necklaces in court. Eventually, AEthelthy/rth was beatified, and - as by this time phonetic change had simplified her name to Audrey - she was known as St. Audrey. An annual fair was held in her memory each October 17th, and at the fair were sold cheap souvenirs, including a neck lace called St. Audrey's lace. In England, the initial [s] of saints 'names is often elided (for instance, the town of St. Albans in Hertfordshire is locally pronounced as [talbans] by some). As a result of this process, by the 1800s, the necklaces were called tawdry laces. It wasn't long before tawdry was applied to the other cheap souvenirs sold at the annual fair, with the result that tawdry became ...
