tar > paint > taint ?

[Joanne M. Despres]

My understanding has always been that it WAS a cruel and life-
threatening punishment, though I can't think of anyone outside the
fictional realm who actually underwent the process.  I guess my
one halfway-realistic impression of it comes from Nathaniel
Hawthorne's story "My Kinsman, Major Molineux," which elicits
considerable sympathy for the victim (Major Molineux).

Joanne

On 9 Feb 2006, at 14:21, Wilson Gray wrote:

> BTW, I've never understood how a person could go through a
> tarring-and-feathering without suffering serious bodily harm or even
> death.Yet I've never even heard of anyone being permanently injured,
> let alone killed, by it.
>
> -Wilson
>
> On 2/9/06, Arnold M. Zwicky <zwicky at csli.stanford.edu> wrote:
> > ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> > Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> > Poster:       "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
> > Subject:      tar > paint > taint ?
> > -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > from this morning's NPR Morning Edition, spoken by Denise Slavin,
> > president of the National Association of Immigration Judges:
> >
> > Unfortunately, there may be problems with a few judges, I don't think
> > we should all be tainted with the same brush.
> >
> > -----
> >
> > well, the original idiom here is "tar with the same brush" (often in
> > the passive), and that's what you find in idiom dictionaries.  on the
> > web, "tar" beats out "taint" all hollow (in raw google webhits as of
> > this morning):
> >
> >    tarred with the same brush: 59,500
> >    tainted with the same brush: 313
> >
> >    tar them all with the same brush: 1,760
> >    taint them all with the same brush: 28
> >
> > is this just a substitution blend, with the more literal "taint"
> > occasionally replacing the metaphorical "tar" in the idiom "tar with
> > the same brush"?  possibly, but there's a third variant attested
> > (with "paint"), and it's intermediate in frequency between "tar" and
> > "taint" (roughly half as frequent as "tar" and hugely more frequent
> > than "taint"):
> >
> >    painted with the same brush: 21,300
> >    paint them all with the same brush: 800
> >
> > now we have a plausible intermediate stage between "tar" and
> > "taint":  under the influence of "brush" in the original idiom,
> > "paint" replaces "tar" (well, people are vastly more familiar with
> > painting with brushes than they are with tarring things with brushes,
> > so "paint" is an improvement), and then the negative content of the
> > idiom is reinforced by replacing the relatively neutral verb "paint"
> > by the decidedly negative (and phonologically very similar) verb
> > "taint".
> >
> > the first of these steps is just the familiar playing of variations
> > on idioms.  Riehemann's 2001 dissertation notes that "throw s.o. to
> > the [large carnivorous animals]" comes in two canonical versions,
> > with "wolves" and "lions" (wolves over lions about 3 to 1), but is
> > also attested, in her corpus, with "tigers", "sharks", and "dogs".
> > there are many similar examples.
> >
> > the second step might be a substitution blend.  or just a creative
> > improvement of "paint with the same brush".
> >
> > arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
> > The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
> >
>
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