I thought I was reasonably informed about some of the weirder notions of how to “prove” guilt or innocence, like trial by combat, trial by ordeal, and the swimming test for accused witches. But I was recently reading a book that introduced me to both a technique and the word for it: cruentation.
Suppose a body is found that has stab wounds. Murder! Using their crack investigative skills, the authorities find a suspect and put that person on trial. During the trial, the body is wheeled into the courtroom on a cart (bier), and the accused is made to put their hands on the corpse. If the wounds begin to bleed, it’s proof that the authorities have nabbed the guilty party.
Thus cruentation: the idea that the body of a victim would ooze blood when it was in the presence of the murderer. Alternative terms are ordeal of the bier or bier-right.
The custom goes back a long way, especially (apparently) in Germany; in the German epic Nibelungenlied (ca. 1200), the corpse of Siegfried bleeds in the presence of Hagen, his killer. Cruentation is mentioned in the Daemonology of James I (he of the King James Bible): “if the deade carcase be at any time thereafter handled by the murtherer, it will gush out of bloud, as if the bloud were crying out to the heaven for revenge of the murtherer.” And had I ever read Richard III by Shakespeare, I might have found these lines:
O, gentlemen, see, see! dead Henry’s wounds
Open their congeal’d mouths and bleed afresh!
Blush, Blush, thou lump of foul deformity;
For ’tis thy presence that exhales this blood
From cold and empty veins, where no blood dwells;
Thy deed, inhuman and unnatural,
Provokes this deluge most unnatural.
Apparently cruentation as a legal technique was still on the books in Germany as late as the 1700s. And in 1869, two bodies were exhumed in Lebanon, Illinois, and the neighbors were marched past to see if the bodies might identify their murderers. This happened in the lifetime of my great-grandparents, hard to believe.
As an aside, why the word cruentation? This is Latin, of course. There’s an obscure word cruentate, which means “blood-stained” and cruent, meaning “bloody” from Latin cruor, “blood, gore.” Not that this is obvious, but this is ultimately related to the word raw (hraew in Old English). <insert joke here about how cruentation often nets someone a raw deal>
For origins this week, I’m looking at a note I left for myself about the word ginger. Ginger is a spice; it’s a word for reddish things; it can mean “vigor, spunk”; and in the adverb gingerly, it means “carefully.” Do all of these meanings derive from a common root? (haha)
To start, there is the spice. We got this in English from Latin and French; it shows up in the earliest written records as gingifer (or variants). This matches late Latin gingiber, earlier Latin zingiber (also the genus name today). Latin got it from Greek, which got it from somewhere east—which makes sense, because the plant and its name seems to have originated in Southeast Asia and spread through India and Iran to the Mediterranean. There are some explanations for why English reduced the word to two syllables, but in any event, that process started in the 1300s and was more or less done by 1600.
The word ginger to refer to a red thing shows up as an adjective in the 1500s “of a reddish-yellow or orange-brown colour resembling that of dried and powdered ginger” with the additional note “in later use esp. with reference to hair, fur, plumage, etc.” For example, in 1785, we have “Red cocks are called gingers”; in 1823, “Ginger, another name for red-haired persons”; and in 1874 “There is a gray tabby, a jet black, and a ginger.” (I don’t think I was aware that referring to a person as a ginger can be considered derogatory.)
The sense of ginger as “vigor, temper” is apparently an American innovation from the 1800s. (“Why don’t those troops show more ginger?”) I haven’t found an explanation of this usage, but we can speculate (only) that this might have derived either from a metaphoric sense (something “spicy”) or been a semantic transfer from ginger roosters, who as fighting cocks would show lots of vigor. But again, speculation. (Then again, compare sugary, peppery, and more recently salty: flavors that have taken on metaphoric meanings.)
So far there are three senses (spice, red, vigor) that derive from the original name of the spice. What about gingerly? That’s apparently unrelated. The word gingerly seems to come from French, though it’s not clear exactly how. Early uses of gingerly referred to daintiness (“And I can dance it gyngerly,” 1520). This might have come from a French word gent (Latin gentius, “well-born”) that also gave us gentle and genteel.
Since I was looking through sources, I also checked on gin as in gin and tonic. This word is also not related to ginger, the spice. Instead, the name gin is a shortened form of genever, from Dutch, which goes back to a Latin word for juniper.
An odd thing about all this research is that I don’t even particularly like ginger as a spice. Though I have had some ginger cats.
Like this? Read all the Friday words.