Part of the reason why “boycott” entered the English language in 1880, it seems, is because “ostracise” – which had been doing the same job already – was too hard for most people to say.
So, at least, claim the memoirs of James Redpath (1833–1891), a campaigning US journalist of the time, who recalled it being the subject of a conversation he had over dinner in the home of a Mayo priest one night in late September of that year.
Fr John O’Malley had been regaling him with the fate of Captain Charles Boycott, Lord Erne’s land agent, from whom the local tenantry had just withdrawn all labour and services.
And approving of the tactic, Redpath was ready to help popularise it. But as a professional communicator, he worried about the terminology.
READ MORE
“Ostracism” would never catch on, he thought: “the peasantry would not know the meaning of the word”. Whereupon, agreeing, the priest “looked down, tapped his big-head”, and asked his guest if he thought the phrase “to Boycott” would work.
With that, a verb was born. Redpath urged the priest to use it locally and get it into the Castlebar Telegraph as soon as possible. He himself, meanwhile, would take to it to Dublin and beyond, “and between us we will make it as famous as ‘Lynching’ in the United States”.
That was a perhaps dubious precedent. But the original Lynch, he reminded O’Malley, was a “Virginia backwoods” judge known for dispensing rough justice to loyalists during the American War of Independence.
Anyway, sure enough, the B-word made its print debut in a Chicago newspaper on October 12th, 1880. As Redpath’s memoirs summed up: “Father John and I kept our compact. He was the first who uttered the word, and I was the first who wrote it.”
It may be ironic that, 146 years of boycotts later, the Irish footballers who played Israel (but withheld handshakes and other social niceties) on Sunday night included a Coventry: midfielder Conor of that surname.
[ Ireland beat Israel in a bleak farce that leaves everyone feeling betrayedOpens in new window ]
Long before “boycott” took off as a term for ostracism, Coventry was the proverbial destination in a popular metaphor that meant the same thing.
Indeed, it was used by Charles Stewart Parnell in the very speech – to Land League members at Ennis on September 19th, 1880 – that prompted the tactics used against Captain Boycott.
First and perhaps unwisely then, Parnell had asked the crowd what they should do with a tenant who sought the land of an evicted neighbour.
When the answers included “shoot him” and “kill him”, the speaker moved swiftly on to suggest a “more Christian and charitable” approach, which would give the sinner a chance to repent:
“ ... 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 on the fair green and in the marketplace, and even in the place of worship, by leaving him alone, by putting him in moral Coventry, by isolating him from the rest of the country, as if he were a leper of old ...”
Parnell’s thesaurus of what we would today call cancellation – “shun”, “isolate”, “[put in] Coventry”, “[treat as a] leper” etc, suggest that, not only was the general tactic well established already, but that Redpath’s concerns about the lack of accessible vocabulary to describe it were unfounded.
To this day, however, it remains a mystery as to why the concept of sending someone to Coventry ever meant what it did.
The phrase is vaguely assumed to derive from the English Civil War when that English city was a parliamentarian stronghold and to be a royalist soldier posted there was to be coolly received.
But whatever its literal origins, it had turned into a fully-fledged metaphor by 1765, when the minutes book of England’s oldest hunting club records this jovial disciplinary action, without further explanation:
“Mr John Barry having sent the Fox Hounds to a different place to what was ordered was sent to Coventry, but return’d upon giving six bottles of claret to the Hunt.”
Half a century later, the phrase made it into Francis Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, as a military punishment for misdemeanours that fell short of court-martial. After a period of ostracism, Grose explained, “the penitent is recalled, and welcomed […] as just returned from a journey to Coventry”.
I’m told that in French, the city of Limoges plays a similar role, immortalised by the verb Limoges. In that case, a more exact equivalence is with the English phrase “to kick [someone] upstairs”: ie promote them to a position where they can’t do any harm.
This one did derive from the fate of certain soldiers in more recent history. During the first World War, Limoges was a long, safe distance from the front. As such, it was where General Joseph Joffre, Commander-in-Chief of the French forces, liked to post senior officers he considered useless.
