Beautiful English Online

Running the big metal glove

You know the phrase "run the gauntlet," that is, undergo a punishment in which a group of men form parallel lines and beat you while you run between them? Well, this is a gauntlet from White Rose Armory. How did it come to mean "a line of angry people hitting you with stuff?" Were the original gauntlet runners struck with large metal gloves? I've often wondered, but Phrase Finder has set me straight:

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 [another idiomatic expression,] 'throwing down the gauntlet' [that is, issuing a challenge].

The illustration below is Spiessgasse (Pike-alley), from the Frundsberger War Book of Jost Amman, 1525, via Answers.com:

Take Umbrage

To "take umbrage" at something is to be offended by it, but as Phrase Finder explains, it was not always so:

Step back to the 15th century and umbrage didn't mean displeasure. The word was inherited into English from the Latin 'umbra', meaning shade. Umbrage came to be used in English to mean shade or shadow, or the foliage of trees which cause shadows.

In fact, it comes from the same root word as umbrella. By the seventeenth century, however, umbrage had taken on a negative connotation. To be "in umbrage" was used to mean "out of favor," much as we use the phrase "under a cloud" -- or "in the dog house":

On the fall of the Duke he stood some yeers in umbrage, and without imployment. -- Sir Robert Naunton, Fragmenta regalia, 1635

It was later in that same century that someone was first said to have "taken umbrage":

The Bishop... took umbrage at his freedom of speech in the pulpit anent [side by side with] the government. -- Lord Fountainhall, The decisions of the Lords of Council and Session, 1680

I like to think of the Bishop as going around with a little black cloud over his head, taking his umbrage with him wherever he went.

 

A Bolt from the Blue

Before today, I never realized that the idiom, "a bolt from the blue," meaning "an unexpected occurrence," referred to a specific type of lightning. Then I read this article in the  Miami Herald about a man who was killed by just such a phenomenon:

Dan Dixon, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Miami, said that when Canales was hit, a typical afternoon storm was forming but nowhere near the area.

Weather data showed that lightning activity picked up north of Pinecrest shortly before 1 p.m., as a storm gathered momentum and swept through Coral Gables and then downtown.

''Most lightning will come from the base of a thunderstorm, inside that rain-shaft area,'' Dixon explained. ``But occasionally, what we call a bolt from the blue comes out of a thunderstorm still several miles away.''. . .

The bolts normally travel horizontally away from the storm and reach farther than typical lightning, then curve to the ground. . . .

Dixon said protecting yourself from such unexpected lightning is difficult.

''They are very unpredictable and very dangerous. We urge people to stay indoors even if you hear thunder only faintly in the distance,'' Dixon said. ``If you're close enough to hear thunder, you're close enough to be struck by lightning.''

So beware the bolt from the blue, whether the metaphorical kind or the very real kind that killed David Canales. The photo is from  NOAA.

The Staff of Life

I've been baking flat bread today, which made me think of the phrase "Bread is the staff of life," and it occurred to me that I had no idea what it really meant. A staff is a walking stick -- so are we saying that bread is the walking stick of life? In what way is it a walking stick? Does it support life as it hobbles along? 

Online Etymology Dictionary explains the origin of the term:

Staff of life "bread" is from the Biblical phrase "to break the staff of bread" (Lev. xxvi.26), transl. Heb. matteh lekhem.

This is translated into Latin as baculum panis, literally the walking stick or staff of bread. The walking stick of BREAD? Are we talking about a really long baguette here?

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, however, this is not (as I thought at first) a physical description of a long loaf of bread: to break the staff of bread is to cut off the supply of bread. It's a strange metaphor -- to break bread's walking stick -- so it's probably not all that unusual that it was rephrased in a later era. And indeed, by the seventeenth century, "supply, the walking stick of bread" becomes "bread, the walking stick of life," in other words its support and mainstay.

Here are the early uses of the phrase "staff of life" listed in the OED:

1638 PENKETHMAN Artach. Ajb, Bread is worth all, being the Staffe of life.

1656 J. HAMMOND Leah & Rachel (1844) 9 Corn (the main staffe of life).
1698 FRYER Acc. E. India & P. 35 For Corn, they have Rice the Staff of the Land.
1860 All Year Round No. 45. 440 Barley bannocks and oat cake long remained the staff of life in villages in Scotland.
1901 D. SLADEN In Sicily I. 372 Broad beans form one of the staves of life in Sicily.n any event,

I'm still not particularly happy with my history of this phrase, and I plan to do more research into it soon. Or maybe I'll strike it lucky and someone who knows a lot more than I do will just leave a comment and clarify everything. In the mean time, though, I'm very happy with the bread I made. See above.