Donald Trump, as most readers will know by now, is a convicted felon. It is also clear to most of us that this is not a very good thing to be. But do we know what a felon is exactly? It is not a term that many of us here in Britain are particularly familiar with – it is much more commonly used in the USA, where felon status may have severe and permanent consequences, eg the loss of voting rights.
I have warned a number of times in this column that as far as the meaning of a word is concerned, we should beware of the dangers of succumbing to “the etymological fallacy”, which holds that the current meaning of a word should be the same as its etymology, that is, the same as its original historical meaning. This is not necessarily the case, of course. Obviously a chairman was originally the man taking the chair at a meeting; a cupboard equally obviously started off as a board for cups; and a saucer clearly began life as something for serving sauces in. But none of these origins is relevant to today’s English language.
The fact is that a word means what it means now, not what it used to mean or what some self-appointed “authority” thinks it ought to mean.
It is still the case, though, that it can be helpful and interesting to examine the historical origins of lexical items. And so here I am going to allow myself the luxury of wondering about the origins of this term for a person who has committed a felony. And Trump has committed lots of them: he has been found guilty by a New York jury of 34 felonies involving the falsification of business records.
The etymology of the word felony is in fact obscure. It first came into English from Old French felonie “wickedness, evil, treachery, perfidy, crime, cruelty, sin”. By 1300 the word had become established in English with the additional meanings of “betrayal; deceit; villainy; violent temper, wrath; ruthlessness; evil intention”.
There are a number of different suggestions in the etymological dictionaries as to where the Old French word originated. Felony may be related to Old High German fillen “to whip”: there was a Frankish form fillo “a person who whips or beats, a scourge”. Second, it could perhaps come from Latin fel “gall, poison”, indicating a person full of bitterness.
A third and more indelicate possibility is that it derives from Latin fellare “to suck”, which had an obscene technical secondary meaning in classical Latin that will apparently be known to devotees of the epigrams of Martial and the love poetry of Catullus. I am guessing that neither Donald Trump nor Stormy Daniels falls into those categories, but in any case we should probably not allow Trump to advise us on this matter, even if his current felony count might seem to make him an expert.
The fact is that even the real experts have to acknowledge that the ultimate etymology of felon is uncertain. Probably it will be enough for most of us just to know that a convicted felon is not a good thing to be, even if it cannot stop you from becoming the president of the United States of America.
Gall
Gall is the same substance as bile, a secretion which issues from the gall bladder and is involved in the process of digestion. It is an Old English word which derives from the ancient Indo-European root ghel, which is also the source of our modern colour term yellow.
