spick and span [L16th] ‘My Lady Batten walking through the dirty lane with new spick and span white shoes’, writes Samuel Pepys in his diary in 1665. He was not saying that her shoes were clean or neat, but that they were brand new, which is what spick and span meant in the 17th century. It was based on the earlier phrase spick and span new, a more emphatic version of the dialect span new, which came from Old Norse spán-nýr, ‘as new as a freshly cut wooden chip’. The spick part was influenced by Dutch spiksplinternieuw, literally ‘splinter new’.