brave [LME] In Old English people with all the attributes of bravery were ‘bold’. In the Middle Ages they could also be ‘courageous’, but it was not until the late 15th century that they became brave. The word came through French from Italian or Spanish bravo and goes back to Latin barbarus, the source of *barbarian. Scots braw [L16th] ‘fine’, bravado [M16th], bravo [E17th], and bravura [M18th] all go back to the same source. The phrase brave new world refers to a new or hopeful period of history brought about by major changes in society—usually implying that the changes are in fact undesirable. It is taken from the title of a satirical novel by Aldous Huxley (1894–1963), published in 1932. Huxley himself borrowed the phrase from a line in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Miranda has grown up isolated on an island with her magician father Prospero, the monster Caliban, and some spirits. On first encountering some other humans she exclaims: ‘How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world / That has such people in it!’ This in itself is satirical, as ‘brave’ here is used in the sense ‘grand, fine, excellent’, which the people in the play turn out not to be.