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**OFF TOPIC** Re. America in So Many Words.
amazon.com
Thanks Jeff, just arrived!
Excited, I turned to page 303 of the Word Index, scanning for "tech".
Sorry:
T
tailings, 147
talk turkey, 7,219
talkie, 210
TAMALE, 40
tank, 216
TAR AND FEATHER, 74
teammate, 48
TEADDY BEAR, 203
teenage, 234
TEENAGER, 233
and so on. . . .
Hmmm. . .
OK, TAR AND FEATHER may be interesting . . .
1769 tar and feather
The practice of smearing the body with tar and then sprinkling the tar with feathers was not original to America. As long ago as 1189, during the reign of Richard the Lionhearted, it was prescribed in the British navy as punishment for theft*. But English colonials brought it ashore in North America and made such use of it that it now is thought of as American. It was described as the "present popular punishment for modern delinquents" in 1769.
The term tar and feather is ours, too, and dates from that time. Richard Thornton's 1912 American Glossary has more than a dozen examples of tar and feather for the years 1769 through 1775, starting with a newspaper account from October 30, 1769. "A person," reported the Boston Chronicle, "was stripped naked, put into a cart, where he was first tarred, then feathered." The Newport Mercury for December 20, 1773, carries a "Notice to the Committe and Tarring and Feathering": "What think you, Captain, of a halter round your neck - ten gallons of liquid tar decanted on your pate - with the feathers of a dozen wild geese laid over that to enliven your appearance?"
During the American Revolution, rebels made examples of British loyalists by tarring and feathering. A memoir of 1774 refers to "the Liberty Boys, the tarring-and-feathering gentlemen." That year a notable victim was "Mr. John Malcomb, and officer of the customs at Boston, who was tarred and feathered, and lead to the gallows with a rope about his neck."
The prohibition in the 1791 Bill fo Rights against "cruel and unusual punishments" may have helped discourage the practice of tarring and feathering, which seems to have vanished by the end of the nineteenth century. Tar and feather remains in our language today, but as a figure of speech for public humiliation."
* techstocks.com
The rewards and punishments of another life. --Locke.
Bounced Czech
(FBNA - Humiliate!) |
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