Q: "gallows" also including a platform?

[Jonathan Lighter]

A gallows figured in a great New Yorker cartoon of many years ago.

Public hanging. Crowd packed tight around the gallows. Hangman at the
ready. Condemned man in tricorne but with a big round smiley face for face.

One onlooker to another: "Aye, laddie, there's spunk!"

JL

On Mon, Jan 7, 2013 at 10:20 AM, Charles C Doyle <cdoyle at uga.edu> wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Charles C Doyle <cdoyle at UGA.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Q:  "gallows" also including a platform?
>
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>
> In fact, the GALLOWS ('platform') was traditionally regarded as a sort of
> stage, whereon the condemned individual might orate or at least perform the
> art of dying well.
>
> In one old jestbook, a condemned rustic, having mounted the gallows,
> surveys the crowd.  Seeing his wife among the spectators, he exclaims,
> "Home and weed, woman!"
>
> --Charlie
>
> ________________________________________
> From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] on behalf of
> Charles C Doyle [cdoyle at UGA.EDU]
> Sent: Monday, January 07, 2013 10:03 AM
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> The locution "mount the gallows" gets some half a million raw Google hits.
>
> --Charlie
> ________________________________________
> From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] on behalf of Amy
> West [medievalist at W-STS.COM]
> Sent: Monday, January 07, 2013 9:04 AM
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On 1/7/13 12:00 AM, Automatic digest processor wrote:
> > Date:    Sun, 6 Jan 2013 21:07:37 -0500
> > From:    "Joel S. Berson"<Berson at ATT.NET>
> > Subject: Q:  "gallows" also including a platform?
> >
> > If someone was to be punished by being "set upon the gallows with a
> > rope around their neck" (as in colonial laws and verdicts), doesn't
> > that mean that there are usages of "gallows" that necessarily include
> > a platform?  The OED merely says the "apparatus" "usually consist[s]
> > of two uprights and a cross-piece".  I know there were hangings where
> > the executioner simply pulled up on a rope, but there were also
> > executions where a "platform" (such as a trap door) was lowered.
> >
> > Joel
> I'm not an expert, but I've heard talks on medieval and Renaissance
> executions, and the period illustrations showed a variety of gallows
> forms: there's the raising, there's standing on something kicked out
> underneath, and then there's the trapdoor. *That* last one  is much
> later, I believe, when they started using the hangman's slipknot in the
> 19th? century. Earlier hangings were death by strangulation, not death
> by snapping the neck.  The OED def, like a good def., is just
> delineating the minimum, allowing for additional elements, because the
> structure does vary by time and place.
>
> ---Amy West
>
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