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January 2008In Case You Were WonderingLate last month, a Siberian tiger attacked three young men in the San Francisco Zoo. As we go to press, the jury is still out on whether Tatiana was provoked, but there's no debating the fact that the grisly event sent folks flocking to the dictionary to look up the word maul. In case you were wondering, this maul has a history older than American zoos; it also has only the most tenuous linguistic link to the mall associated with shopping. Read on to find out more. When the verb maul first appeared in English back in the 13th century, it meant "to strike or knock down with or as if with a maul (a weapon in the form of a heavy club)." That sense disappeared by the mid 17th century, around the same time maul picked up other applications: "to beat and bruise; to injure by or as if by beating; mangle." What about the shopping mall? That mall originates in the 17th century game of pall-mall, in which each player attempts to drive a wooden ball down an alley with a mallet. Pall-mall came to name the mallet; mall came to name the pall-mall alley; and the London promenade that was originally a pall-mall alley became known as the Mall and forerunner of the building or buildings associated with shopping centers. Both the noun maul and the noun mall, share the same Middle English ancestor as the noun mallet. |