There was a time when if you wanted to speak disparagingly of money you would call it ‘filthy lucre’. It was, for as long as I can remember, a whimsical expression. If a friend accepted a new job at higher pay you might, for example, make a flippant remark about his going for the ‘filthy lucre’.
Eric Partridge includes ‘filthy lucre’ in his Dictionary of Clichés as one of those tired expressions that should be put out to pasture. Well, I suspect it now has been (I certainly haven’t heard it for a while). But it reigned in the world of whimsy and feeble jokes for many years—put there by the King James Version of the Bible. That’s where we read that deacons must be “grave, not double-tongued, not given to much wine, not greedy of filthy lucre” (1 Tim 3:8). The same expression turns up in a handful of other places in Scripture (in the KJV at least).
This word ‘lucre’ comes, ultimately, from the Latin lucrum meaning “profit, gain, greed, wealth” and it may have come into English either directly or via French (those Normans again). It was Wycliffe’s team of early Bible translators who first put it into print. And it was the Wycliffe crowd who chose ‘filthy’ as the adjective that would be forever superglued to ‘lucre’. ‘Filthy’, by the way, comes from the same source as the word ‘foul’ in the sense of being putrid or corrupt.
This expression (and its long life in English, going back to at least 1380) has helped to convey the notion that there is always something sordid about the desire for wealth or affluence. And while modern translations have long dispensed with ‘filthy lucre’, the older expression did help to point us to a small, but useful, theological point: namely, that every reference to wealth or affluence in the New Testament is negative—it is always seen as a danger, not something to be desired and pursued.
And that, perhaps, is a point worth remembering as our society becomes ever more affluent and ‘filthy lucre’ slowly fades from the living language.
