Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

word of the day: frog-march

The Washington Post did a whole story today about the colorful term “frog-march,” used recently by former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV regarding the person he suspects leaked his wife’s identity and occupation to several reporters:

“At the end of the day it’s of keen interest to me to to see whether or not we can get Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs.”

The Post goes so far as to look up the origins of the word — its early usage, and how its meaning has evolved. (“Hop, Two, Three, Four: Frog-Marching Into the Lexicon” - 10/01/03)

The first recorded usage — from a British newspaper in 1871, according to the Oxford English Dictionary — doesn’t help much: “They did not give the defendant the ‘Frog’s March.’”

You gather the defendant was lucky.

Later uses clarify the meaning: It’s slang for “the method of carrying a drunken or refractory prisoner face downwards between four men, each holding a limb,” says the OED. The prisoner or the drunk “was thought to look like a frog,” says Jesse Sheidlower, principal North American editor for the OED.

But that meaning quickly got superseded by the more modern sense: “To grasp by the arm and force to walk along,” according to Webster’s New World College Dictionary, which also says the expression is chiefly a British colloquialism.

“I have the image of a guard on each side grabbing one arm and lifting both feet off the ground, and the legs are scrambling for purchase on the ground, and hence kinked like a frog’s — but that’s just my mental image,” says Mike Agnes, editor in chief of Webster’s New World Dictionaries.

Now the concisely evocative verb is making a successful amphibious invasion of Washington patois. If the flap blows into a scandal with a ruinous aftermath, “frog-marched out of the White House” could become one of those chiseled expressions that summon an affair for the ages, like “hanging chad,” “I did not have sex with that woman” and “I am not a crook.”

The Post cites a few linguists who expect the term to explode into the popular venacular. It’s a fun word — very colorful. I “hear” it with a bit of a growl, and a hint of anger and righteous indignation … either that, or a kind of “good ol’ boy” Southern twang.