I sure did teach a lot of Zoom classes this week. Nothing I could come up with right now would be the equal of this twitter thread on the word “boycott,” so I am taking the week off.
tonight i learned the word "boycott" entered English in 1880 w rapid uptake, and is named after a specific dude, Charles C. Boycott - a loathsome English land agent against whom the Irish mobilized a successful campaign to make it impossible for him to function in normal society
August 27th 2020 473 Retweets 1,531 Likes
In case you use a screen reader or just prefer not to read teeny-tiny screenshot text, here’s the OED entry in the tweet’s first image:
boycott, v.
Pronunciation: Brit. /ˈbɔɪkɒt/, U.S. /ˈbɔɪˌkɑt/
Origin: From a proper name. Etymon: proper name Boycott.
Etymology: < the name of Captain Charles C. Boycott (1832–97), a land agent in Ireland, who was a prominent early recipient of such treatment (with the encouragement of the Irish Land League) in the autumn of 1880. See, for example: 1880 Freeman's Jrnl. (Dublin) 25 Sept. 6/8 The multitude..rushed to Loughmask House, the residence of Captain Boycott, the agent on the estate, and the party against whom the popular ire was chiefly directed, and in a very short time every labourer and servant employed on or around the place was driven off and cautioned not to work there again.The word was rapidly adopted in many other European languages, e.g. French boycotter (1880), German boycottieren (1893; now boykottieren), Dutch boycotten (1904), Russian bojkotirovat' (1891), etc.
transitive. Of tenants in Ireland: to isolate and ostracize (a landlord or land agent, or anyone not participating in such action) socially and commercially, by withholding labour, the supply of food, custom, etc., in order to protest at the eviction of tenants, secure a reduction in rents, etc. Now historical.
And the Wikipedia text from the tweet’s second image:
On 19 September 1880, Parnell gave a speech in Ennis, County Clare to a crowd of Land League members.[15] He asked the crowd, "What do you do with a tenant who bids for a farm from which his neighbour has been evicted?"[15] The crowd responded, "kill him", "shoot him".[15] Parnell replied:[16]
I wish to point out to you a very much better way – a more Christian and charitable way, which will give the lost man an opportunity of repenting. When a man takes a farm from which another has been evicted, you must shun him on the roadside when you meet him – you must shun him in the streets of the town – you must shun him in the shop – you must shun him on the fair green and in the market place, and even in the place of worship, by leaving him alone, by putting him in moral Coventry,[note 1] by isolating him from the rest of the country, as if he were the leper of old – you must show him your detestation of the crime he committed.
This speech set out the Land League's powerful weapon of social ostracism, which was first used against Charles Boycott.[15]
Regarding “moral Coventry” in the quoted passage above, the expression “send to Coventry,” meaning to shun, has its own Wikipedia page. I checked the OED, too, because who am I, and the origin of the phrase is not certain, but the city of Coventry seems to be where prisoners were sent in at least one historical instance, and possibly was also a place that your unwanted neighbors would go if you drove them out of your town. I guess it wasn’t a place people went for fun?
I like that we have two proper nouns that have been adapted this week, and they both have to do with shunning. Imagine being such a dick that your name goes down in history as a verb meaning “to isolate and ostracize” and later “to refuse to deal with.” Incredible. Congrats to the Irish Land League on their victory.
This week in Capital-R Romance, I taught a lot of French classes, which I will be doing every week until December. It’s weird to be back in academia after four years away, and to have returned at such a strange moment, but I’m still enjoying myself. It turns out that I like the job I suffered through eight years of graduate school for? It’s not a job I’ll ever have on a permanent, full-time basis—it’s not me, it’s you, academia—but it’s fun to dip my toes back in.
This week in small-r romance, I read…
The Sugared Game (bi m/gay m, both cis, historical, thriller) by KJ Charles. Look, this newsletter is already basically a missive from the KJ Charles Appreciation Society, which meets wherever I happen to be at every minute of every day, and there’s only so many ways I can tell you a book is perfect, but let’s linger over a few. It is very hard to write something that balances a romance and an adventure as well as these books do, and harder to still to persuade readers that two characters who are so continually at odds could be genuinely good together if one of them would just stop fucking doing espionage for two minutes, but this series is walking that tightrope so beautifully. Most of my feelings are reader-feelings (“nooo, don’t say that!” or “aww” or “yes! punch him!”), but I did pause once while slurping down this book to marvel in writerly awe: I figured out a key part of the mystery a scant few pages before the main character did, which is the most satisfying moment to figure something out. As a reader, you get to feel smug about your detective skills, and you get to watch the main character flail a little, but not so long that it becomes tiresome. But how did KJ Charles time things so perfectly? Did she read my mind? It feels like she read my mind. That’s how good this book is. Content warnings: violence, murder, sex, racism, mentions of miscarriage, mentions of self-harm, mention of suicide.
And in things that are neither Romance nor romance, I finished RF Kuang’s The Poppy War. It’s extremely compelling, and while the book begins with a lovely going-to-magic-school interlude, the rest of it is about war, and quite pointedly about genocide. It is dark. It translates the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century China—and specifically the Nanjing Massacre—into an epic fantasy setting. Kuang does great work developing the world, and I was invested in what would happen to the furious, power-hungry female main character (or rather, what she would make happen). But readers should know what they’re getting into with this book. Content warnings: war, violence, gore, genocide, rape, abuse, experimentation, addiction, sterilization.
I’ve also been thinking a lot about this beautiful, heartbreaking Eve Ewing poem, “I saw Emmett Till this week at the grocery store.”
Boycott and send to Coventry anyone who deserves it, and I’ll see you next week!