gargoyle

October 16, 2020

16 October 2020

A gargoyle is a decorative carving of an animal, human, or humanoid on a building with a waterspout to carry rainwater away from the building’s walls. The word enters English from the Anglo-Norman French gargole or gargoule and the medieval Latin, gargola. The word has the same root as gargle and gurgle, an echoic reference to water passing through a pipe.

The word is attested to in English as early as 1286 in a construction inventory that lists two gargurl made for the great gate of Cambridge Castle. And there are many medieval references to gargoyles. As an example, one later use of the word, in John Lydgate’s c.1425 Troy Book, uses it more poetically in this description of the city of Troy:

And euery hous cured was with led;
And many gargoyl & many hidous hed
With spoutis þoruȝ, & pipes as þei ouȝt,
From þe ston-werke to þe canel rauȝt,
Voyding filþes low in-to þe grounde,
Þoruȝ gratis percid of yren percid rounde.
(And every house was covered with lead; and many gargoyles and many hideous heads, through spouts and pipes reaching out from the stonework to the canal, voiding filth low into the ground through round grates of pierced iron.)

According to myth, in the seventh century a dragon, named Gargouille rose from the waters of the Seine River in France. Unlike the typical dragons of mythology, this one did not breathe fire, but rather was a water dragon. The monster proceeded to lay waste to the countryside around Paris by drowning it. St. Romanus (Romain), the Archbishop of Rouen, accompanied only by a condemned prisoner, set out to stop the beast. Upon confronting the monster, the saint formed a cross with his two index fingers, taming Gargouille. The dragon was led back to Paris, where it was slain and burned. In some versions, the head, however, was saved and mounted on a building, giving rise to the practice of mounting gargoyles on buildings.

It’s a neat story, but it is not the origin of the word gargoyle. Almost nothing is known of St. Romanus, and the story of Gargouille the dragon doesn’t appear until some seven centuries after his death and after the architectural practice and the term were well established. It’s more likely that the gargoyles on buildings inspired the story rather than the other way around.

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Sources:

Butler’s Lives of the Saints, vol. 4 of 4. Herbert Thurson and Donald Attwater, eds. Westminster, Maryland: Christian Classics, 1956, 183. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013, s.v. gargola. Brepols.

Lydgate, John. Troy Book (c. 1425), vol. 1 of 4. Early English Text Society (EETS), Extra Series 97. London: K. Paul, Trench, & Trübner, 1906, lines 2.695–700, 164. HathiTrust Digital Library.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. gargoile, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. gargoyle, n.

Salzman, L.F. Building in England, Down to 1540: A Documentary History. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952, 108. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Photo credit: Jebulon, 2015, public domain image.

frog march

October 15, 2020

Four London police carrying a man face down, by the arms and legs, with the caption “Death from the ‘frog’s march,’ Eastend.”

15 October 2020

Frog-marching is a police tactic for moving a recalcitrant prisoner from place to place. The name seems odd to us today because the present-day tactic doesn’t seem to have anything to do with frogs. But that’s because exactly what frog-marching consists of has changed.

The tactic originated in London, and the earliest reference to it is in the 18 April 1871 Evening Standard:

They did not give the defendant the “Frog’s March.”

While that snippet doesn’t tell us what frog-marching was, we fortunately do have this better description from a New York newspaper on 27 March 1874

The “Frog’s March.”
The London police have a method of dealing with prisoners, which has not yet been introduced here, though it doubtless will be as soon as it is known. The London method is called the “frog’s march” in which the prisoner is carried to the station, with the face downwards and the whole weight of the body dependent on the limbs. This has called forth severe remarks, and has done much to embitter the relations between the “police and the public,” but the barbarous proceeding still continues.

So, the phrase comes from the resemblance of the prisoner to a frog crawling on its belly.

Being frog-marched in this fashion is, as the above quotation notes, rather painful, especially if done over a distance. Outcry against this tactic eventually caused police to abandon it, but the term stuck around, being applied to a different method, as described in John Ferguson’s 1931 crime novel Death Comes to Perigord:

Cæsar slewed him round, and forcing both arms behind his back, got ready to frog-march him to the door.

While still far from gentle, the present-day version of frog-marching is comparatively more humane.

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Sources:

“The ‘Frog’s March.’” Commercial Advertiser (New York), 27 March 1874, 1. NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. frogmarch, v., frogmarch, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, November 2010, s.v. frog-march, v., frog-march, n., frog-marching, n.

Image credit: Illustrated Police News (London), 6 April 1889, 1. Public domain image. Gale Primary Sources: British Library Newspapers.

French kiss

October 14, 2020

14 October 2020

A French kiss is a deep, open mouth kiss that uses the tongue as well as the lips. The term dates to the early twentieth century, and the earliest known use of the term is by a U.S. soldier in France during World War I—but we cannot say that the term was invented during that war. It likely predates the war in oral use.

On 30 December 1918, Private Clarance Lindner wrote home to his family:

So I have decided to become a linguist. Being able to read French fluently and speak it wretchedly, and to speak German connectively but not to read it at all, I am taking up Luxembourg, which is a wonderful blend of the two, a sort of laison [sic] between tongues. (Not to be confused with French kissing.)

The OED has an 1858 citation for French kissing, but this is a reference to the practice of greeting someone by kissing them on both cheeks, not a tongue kiss.

It’s possible that Lindner’s parenthetical reference to French kissing is a later editorial intervention. Lindner’s letters were collected and privately published by his family in 1939. We do not have the originals. Questions of accuracy and originality are generally an issue with collections of letters and papers that have been published by interested parties. Scholarly collections are more likely to scrupulous in noting where they make editorial interventions.

But we get a fuller description of French kissing a few years later in Elliot Paul’s 1922 Indelible, so the 1918 date isn’t far off in any case:

When it was real dark we began kissing each other. We stayed there quite a while, and I hugged her as best I could, although I remembered afterwards what the book said about not doing it, so you could look your wife in the face.
She showed me the French kiss where you stick your tongue out, but I did n’t [sic] like it. Ethel was as restless as could be, and all of a sudden she burst out crying. She said nothing was the matter, and as soon as she quieted down, I went home, as it was late.

We suspect the term is older than these recorded citations because the adjective French has a long history of association with things sexual. This association dates to the Restoration of the seventeenth century, as found in an anonymous satirical poem from 1682 that describes the sexual proclivities of various women in the English court:

Vernon, to say the truth’s a bouncing wench,
She swears and fucks and all the while’s so French!

There you have it, from the court of Charles II to American soldiers in WWI.

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Sources:

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, French kiss, n.

Lindner, Clarence R., Private Lindner’s Letters, edited by Gladys Dudley Lindner (San Francisco, 1939), 119.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2009, s.v. French kiss, n., French kiss, v., French, adj. and n.

Paul, Elliot H. Indelible. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1922, 60–61. HathiTrust Digital Library.

“Satire ((April,) 1682).” Court Satires of the Restoration. John Harold Wilson, ed.. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1976, 82. HathiTrust Digital Library.

gam

October 13, 2020

13 October 2020

Gam is a slang term for a leg, in current usage usually referring to a woman’s leg. It comes from the French jambe (gambe in earlier dialect) and the Italian gamba, both also meaning leg, probably via nautical slang and the pidgin Mediterranean Lingua Franca. It’s recorded in English in the late eighteenth century.

The earliest English use of the word is in the form gambo and appears in Hicky’s Bengal Gazette, or the Original Calcutta General Advertiser for 1–8 September 1781. That paper, based in Kolkata, was the first newspaper printed in Asia. It ran for two years before being shut down by the East India Company because of its criticism of the company, its provocative style, and subjects it dealt with. In this case, the paper printed a 6 January 1777 letter allegedly written by a sailor aboard the Royal Duke to a shipmate:

Ruisle [?] by the help of the Cobbler of Bones, can walk. ——As for me D—n my E—s if I e’nt Hobbling only a little tender in the Larboard side my Starboard gambo a little shattered however. I think I shall be able with little Repairs to receive your broadside.

The English word is probably borrowed from Mediterranean Lingua Franca, a pidgin of various Italian dialects, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Berber, Turkish, Greek, and Arabic, that was spoken in the Mediterranean region from the eleventh through nineteenth centuries, and was also common among British sailors.

The word is recorded in Grose’s 1785 Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue with the spellings of both gambs and gams:

GAMBS, thin, ill shaped legs; a corruption of the French word jambes.
SHANKS, legs, or gams.

Gamb is also a heraldic term for an animal’s leg as it appears on a coat of arms. And the French root is also the source for jamb, the side posts on a window or door. These uses are older. Heraldic use dates to the seventeenth century, and jamb for a door’s side post can be found as early as 1334.

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Sources:

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, gam, n.1.

Grose, Francis. A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. London: S. Hooper, 1785, vi, 145. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Hicky’s Bengal Gazette, or the Original Calcutta General Advertiser, 1–8 September 1781, 1. British Library, Eighteenth Century Journals 3.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. jaumbe, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2013, s.v. gam, n.2, gamb, n.; second edition, 1989, jamb, n.

freelance / freelancer

October 12, 2020

12 October 2020

A freelancer is someone who offers their services for hire, someone who is not a permanent employee of a company. The word, as one might suspect, is a metaphor for a medieval mercenary, a knight who will fight under the banner of whoever pays him. But the word is not actually a medieval one but rather arose in nineteenth-century romantic tales of medieval chivalry. The noun follows a rather standard trajectory, at first used literally, then figuratively, then becoming a verb, and finally to taking an -er ending to differentiate the person from the action.

Freelance, in the sense of a mercenary, appears in Walter Scott’s 1819 novel Ivanhoe, set in twelfth-century England:

I offered Richard the service of my Free Lances, and he refused them. I will lead them to Hull, seize on shipping, and embark for Flanders. Thanks to the bustling times, a man of action will always find employment.

Within a few decades, freelance started to be used figuratively, at first in the realm of politics to refer to politicians who ignored or resisted party discipline. From the Hertford Mercury of 8 March 1851:

Better, then, it must be to hold to men who may be willing to take a lesson from the past, than to be the mercy of Protectionists—whether changed or unchanged;—of Jesuitical optimists, whose political creed runs, “Whatever is, is right;”—or of those free lances of Radicalism, who never having tasted the sweets of power, might prove unmanageable in the career of their early temptations.

The verb to freelance appears in the 1880s. From a 29 October 1881 article in the Wheeling Register of West Virginia about Cornelius Vanderbilt undercutting the prices of other railroads until they agree to join a cartel and fix prices:

Later it was said that Vanderbilt would not be influenced by the addition of these companies, but would continue to free lance until all other trunk lines agree to the abolishment of the differential rates.

And freelancer appears by the end of the nineteenth century, with the -er distinguishing the actor from the act. Again, from the realm of politics, there is this sub-headline about Liberal opposition backbenchers ignoring their party’s leadership in a Sheffield, England paper from 8 August 1895:

The Freelancer and the Opposition.

So, like much of present-day perceptions of the medieval era, freelance is more fantasy than history.

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Sources:

“Buying and Selling.” Wheeling Register (West Virginia), 26 October 1881, 1. NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Contemporary Gossip.” Evening Telegraph and Star and Sheffield Daily Times, 8 August 1895, 2. Gale News Vault.

“Original Correspondence.” The Hertford Mercury, 8 March 1851, 2. Gale Primary Sources: British Library Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2008, s.v. freelance, n., adj., and adv.; freelance, v.; freelancer, n.

Scott, Walter. Ivanhoe (1819). London: Cassell. 280. HathiTrust Digital Archive.