I'll share one little tidbit of interesting stuff with you now, and then I'm off. Lord knows I'm tired enough. The whole getting-up-before-9am thing left me off-my-game all day (helloooo, who falls asleep in their office chair before the work day is over? I'm not that person!). Then, I added the physical tired-ness of mowing the entire lawn tonight. And I'm exhausted. Definitely a good night for early-to-bed (I'm going to intentionally skip the early-to-rise part of that old saying for tomorrow... maybe someday I'll test out its validity).
So... have you heard about the new techie word burning up the airwaves this week? Someone somewhere has created a new category for e-mail... and it stuck (for now). Most people know, by now, that unwanted, unsolicited, junk e-mail is called spam. But then there's that e-mail that's not really spam... the newsletters you've signed up to receive, the auto notifications (MySpace, Facebook, etc.), the updates from web sites you care about. You want it, but you definitely don't want it right now. The new word for that e-mail is bacn. Funny, huh? Anyway... so I got a little bacn today, and when I did get around to reading it, I was interested. So, I subject you to it here. This particular e-mail newsletter is one of those that I feel like makes me just the slightest bit smarter. It's not leaps-and-bounds material, but there's a little nice-to-know tidbit in it every once in a while. It's the Phrase-a-Week newsletter... where the newsman takes a phrase that's just part of our vernacular and researches what it really means, where it originated, and how it's evolved. In today's episode? Run the gauntlet! Now, I don't think I overuse this phrase, but these words have definitely come out of my mouth on several occasions. So, he caught my attention with this one.
Meaning: To go through a series of criticisms or harsh treatments at the hands of one's detractors.
Origin: Gauntlets are familiar to us today as the stout leather gloves used for gardening and the like. Mediaeval gauntlets were made of even sterner stuff. They were gloves that formed part of a suit of armour. Gauntlets, or gantlettes, gauntelotes etc., were usually covered with plates of steel and were as useful for attack as for defence. When a dispute arose involving a member of the English nobility who was wealthy enough to own his own armour then he (it was always a he) would literally 'throw down the gauntlet' as a challenge. That phrase is first recorded in Hall's Chronicles of Richard III, 1548: "Makynge a proclamacion, that whosoeuer would saie that kynge Richard was not lawefully kynge, he woulde fighte with hym at the vtteraunce, and threwe downe his gauntlet."
Another ancient custom of British fighting men was a form of punishment in which the culprit was made to run stripped to the waist between two rows of men who whipped and beat him as he passed by. These beatings were extremely severe and the victims often died as a result - and many of those that didn't may well have wished they had, as survivors were sometimes executed afterwards. This punishment is the source of the term 'running the gauntlet' and was used by both the British army and navy.
It would be natural to assume that gauntlets were used in the beatings and that 'running the gauntlet' derived from that. In fact, that's not the case and neither the punishment nor the phrase have anything to do with gauntlets, either military or horticultural.
The name of the brutal punishment was originally 'running the gantelope'. Gantlope is an Anglicised form of the Swedish word 'gatlop', or 'gatu-lop', which refers to the gate of soldiers that the victim had to pass through. The Ist Earl of Shaftsbury recorded the phrase in his Diary, 1646: "Three were condemned to die, two to run the gantelope." It didn't take long for gantlope to migrate into ganlet, or gauntlet - possibly as a result of a simple muddle over the similar-sounding words or possibly because of the association with the use of gauntlets as weapons and with the antagonism implicit in 'throwing down the gauntlet'.
Consider yourself a little bit smarter today... and all because of me. Ha... laughable! Enjoy your Friday, peeps. Much love to all of you'uns.
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