The use of the word “sely” in this paper’s title is likely to be confusing to anyone not versed in the historic development of the word. Originally (in Anglo Saxon) “saelig” meant “blessed, holy” and was typically applied to religious figures. The meaning shifted in Middle English (as sely) to meaning “worthy, noble, excellent” and sometimes with the sense “fortunate, lucky, prosperous.” One can trace the connections: holy people are worthy and considered to have inherent nobility, and one can conclude that worthy and noble people may have achieved that state due to good fortune and luck.
But then the word took a sideways shift. Lucky, prosperous people are assumed to be happy. And “sely” began being used with a range of meanings in the field of “lucky, happy, pleasant”. It’s likely that this is the sense Chaucer intended when he described the young and sexually-desiring widow Dido as “sely”. (She would be an odd candidate for being considered “holy” though perhaps she would fit “noble, worthy”.)
By the 15th century, the type of happiness and good nature described by “sely” was no longer considered to derive from good fortune and inherent virtue, but rather from a state of innocence of evil. Not innocence from evil, but an obliviousness to the bad things in the world. “Sely” came to mean “innocent, harmless” and then “simple (minded), guileless, foolish gullible.” One finds the word used to describe people with intellectual disabilities, perhaps in parallel with calling them “innocents”.
Once associated with a lack of intellectual capacity, new meanings attached themselves from the common social fate of such persons: “weak, helpless, defenseless” and by extension “wretched, unfortunate, miserable” leading to use as “worthless, trifling, insignificant”. The word has come into modern English as “silly.”
Those familiar with folklore and old ballads may also have encountered the variant “seelie” and “unseelie” as applied to categories of the Fair Folk, with the Seelie Court being those who are generally friendly towards humans (drawing from some of the earlier positive senses) and the Unseelie Court being those who are hostile. (Historic usage data from https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sely)
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