BEYOND THE PALE
[Q] From Jon Pearce: “Any idea where beyond the pail comes from and what it means?”
[A] That’s a common misspelling these days because the word that really belongs in the expression has gone out of use except in this one situation. The expression is properly beyond the pale. It means an action that is regarded as outside the limits of acceptable behaviour, which is unacceptable or improper. A classic example is in The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens, dated 1837: “I look upon you, sir, as a man who has placed himself beyond the pale of society, by his most audacious, disgraceful, and abominable public conduct”. The earliest example known is from A Compleat History of Rogues of 1720.
That word pale has nothing to do with the adjective for something light in colour except that both come from Latin roots. The one referring to colour is from the Latin verb pallere, to be pale, whilst our one is from palus, a stake.
A pale is an old name for a pointed stake driven into the ground and — by an obvious-enough extension — to a barrier made of such stakes, a fence (our modern word pole is from the same source, as are impale and paling). This meaning has been around in English since the fourteenth century. By 1400 it had taken on various figurative senses — a defence, a safeguard, a barrier, an enclosure, or a limit beyond which it was not permissible to go. The idea of an enclosed area still exists in some English dialects.
In particular, the term was used to describe various defended enclosures of territory inside other countries. For example, the English pale in France in the fourteenth century was the territory of Calais, the last English possession in that country. The best-known modern example is the Russian Pale, between 1791 and the Revolution of 1917, which were specified provinces and districts within which Russian Jews were required to live. Another famous one is the Pale in Ireland, that part of the country over which England had direct jurisdiction — it varied from time to time, but was an area of several counties centred on Dublin. The first mention of the Irish Pale is in a document of 1446–7. Though there was an attempt later in the century to enclose the Pale by a bank and ditch (which was never completed), there never was a literal fence around it.
The expression has often been claimed to originate in one or other of these pales, most commonly the Irish one. However, the first example known to the Oxford English Dictionary is in a work by Sir John Harington, The History of Polindor and Flostella, written sometime before 1612 but published in 1657: “Both Dove-like roved forth beyond the pale / To planted Myrtle-walk.” This is rather late if the Irish Pale were the source. Moreover, this example used the word in the literal sense of a boundary or enclosure, not the modern figurative one, so that there’s no conceptual link either.
The earliest relevant figurative sense was of a sphere of activity or interest, a branch of study or a body of knowledge; we use field in much the same way. This first appeared in 1483 in one of the earliest printed books in English, The Golden Legende, a translation by William Caxton of a French work.
Our figurative sense seems in part to have grown out of this, since those who exist outside such a conceptual pale are not of our kind and do not share our values, beliefs or social customs. There may well have been an echo of a literal pale as well, with an implication that civilisation stopped at its boundary.
Last updated 2 Feb 2008
