speak [OE] The close relationship between speak and speech is clearer in the original Old English, where they are sprecan and sprēc, the ‘r’ dropping out of the words early on. ‘I speak as I find’, first appears in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew: ‘Mistake me not; I speak but as I find.’ Never speak ill of the dead has an even longer history. ‘Speak no evil of the dead’ is attributed to the Spartan magistrate Chilon as far back as the 6th century bc, and a later Latin proverb, de mortuis nil nisi bonum, can be translated as ‘say nothing of the dead but what is good’. The English version of the proverb is first recorded in the 16th century, originally in the form ‘rail not upon him that is dead’. Speakeasy [L19th] an American term for an unlicensed drinking establishment, gets its name for ‘speak’ and ‘easy’ in the sense ‘gently, softly’ from the need to be discreet when talking about it. See also ache.