Take It Away

Let me begin today with the word I paired with gallimaufry in my post Pedantic Night Before Christmas. It is the word rapine, which is sometimes confused with raping. It is used in the phrase rapine and pillage, an emphasis by redundancy. (Although there is a difference between the two words.)

Rapine is a noun for someone else’s property that is violently seized and carried off . It came to English in the early 1400s from the Middle French word rapine, which they got from the Latin word rapina, a word meaning robbery or plunder. It is a form of the Latin word rapere, which means to carry off or seize. We get the word rapid from the same root word, because it is important to be quick when robbing or plundering. Don’t hang around – grab it and go. Rapine's use in the aforementioned poem PNBC may have been slightly off, as it referred not to what Santa was carrying off from the house, but what he was carrying to the house. In essence he was delivering the children’s rapine, although neither the children nor Santa seized it by force. I just renewed my poetic license at the PMV.

Pillage has a more personal sense to it, and means to strip of money or goods by force. There is a sense of taking it off the person, where rapine may not be as a result of any personal contact. Pillage comes from the Old French word pilage, which came from pillier, which meant to loot or ill-treat. It may have come from the Vulgar Latin word piliare, which means to plunder, and was probably from a figurative use of the Latin word pilare, which means to “strip of hair”. Scalping comes to mind, but that’s more severe and isn’t what’s meant here. Pilare may also have meant skinning or plucking of feather or fleecing; perhaps less violent than scalping. We get the word depilatory from the same root word.

Scalp, as a verb, has two meanings (in the same way as fleece). It means to tear or cut the scalp off someone. In that sense it has been in use since the 1670s and was originally used in reference to a practice of Native Americans. The word scalp originally came into English to describe the skin atop the head. It has been used in English since about 1300, and it may have come from the Old Norse word skalli, which is the word for a bald head. Another possible source from Old Norse is skalpr, which sounds closer but means “sheath.” I like the skalli option better. It seems that the French scalpe and the German and Swedish scalp both came from the English word.

The second meaning of scalp is to sell (usually tickets) at an inflated price. It has an interesting story behind its etymology (thank you, etymonline.com). In the late 19^th century it was used of people who would sell the unused portions of railway tickets. It seems that the longer you traveled the cheaper the fare on a per-mile basis. So someone going from the east coast to the Midwest could buy a transcontinental ticket, get off at their destination and sell the remainder of the ticket for more money than if they’d bought the ticket for only their portion of the trip. While it was used as early as 1869 of theater tickets it developed a sense by the late 1800s for not only selling of tickets for a profit but also as “scalper” to describe any con-man or cheater.

Fleece has a longer history of meaning cheat or swindle. It developed that meaning in the 1570s, only 40 years after arriving in English as a description of the shearing of sheep. The noun form, meaning the coat of wool that covers a sheep, came to Old English as fleos, and came to Old English from a West Germanic word flusaz, although there’s no written proof of that.

So don't get fleeced by a scalper, and don't let them take any rapine or pillage.