El Origen de las lexias "de toda broza", "a toda broza": un caso de contaminación

Resum

The two phrases quoted are exceedingly common in Castilian literary texts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including the popular Guzmán de Alfarache. Hence the attempts, albeit unsatisfactory, at semantic and etymological explanation by lexicographers in these periods. Having conducted a detailed analysis of both the literary and lexicographical types of testimony, I propose that the irrelevance of the latter and the vagueness of the former are due to lack of awareness that the two phrases are hybrid derivatives of similar cognate ones in which the head noun was not broza but boça, a term from the lexical field of weaponry, which in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries passed from Italian into French, Catalan and Spanish, and referred to a test to which the principal pieces of armour were subjected to check their strength.