"Walk the plank", 1763 (UNCLASSIFIED)

[Jonathan Lighter]

Style of dress is optional.

However, I didn't make that up. I read some years ago - maybe in the
'90s - that no real pirates were known to have made people walk the
plank and that it was a romantic 19th C. conceit.

The miracle of databases shows that sometimes people did walk the
plank.  But the evidence suggests that it didn't happen very often,
and that the actual phrase "walk the plank" was not an established
idiom. And that the whole idea of "get captured by pirates and be made
to walk the plank" wasn't much of a meme.

JL

On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 11:31 AM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: "Walk the plank", 1763 (UNCLASSIFIED)
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Oct 11, 2011, at 11:15 AM, Mullins, Bill AMRDEC wrote:
>
>> Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
>> Caveats: NONE
>>
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>>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>>> Poster:       Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
>>> Subject:      Re: "Walk the plank", 1763
>>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> ------
>>> -
>>>
>>> Pirate scholars maintain that there is no evidence that "walking the
>>> plank" was a popular diversion . . .
>>>
>>>
>>
>> "Pirate scholars" -- this brings to mind the image of a peg-legged,
>> eye-patched, parrot-bearing researcher walking to reference desk asking
>> "Arrh, where be the special collections, matey??"
>> Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
>> Caveats: NONE
>>
> Well, better that than simple plagiarizers.
>
> LH
>
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