That’s totally beyond the pale
Well, if finally happened. Namely, I got sufficiently interested to look up the origin of "beyond the pale." It's not that I use the phrase every day but I've heard it more than a few times and, although the meaning is clear (as in – that is SO out there, it's really beyond the pale) I couldn't really see how the word pale had anything logical to do with the phrase. So I looked it up.
It's pretty interesting. I'll bet some of you already knew that the English pale referred to part of Ireland. And it did. But that doesn't really answer the question "why pale?"
To start – it doesn't come from pale as in "light in color." The origin was palus, which was Latin for a wooden stake that you'd drive into the ground. And it especially was associated with a whole bunch of stakes that you laid out in a line to form a fence. Which led to it being associated with a boundary. Which then further mutated to mean the lands outside of one country but still under its control (still fenced in, as it were).
And this is where the English pale comes in. It referred to the parts of Ireland, including Dublin among others, which were controlled by England from the eleven hundreds up until Queen Elizabeth grabbed the whole island.
So "beyond the pale" certainly means "out there." Once you go beyond the pale you're well and truly on your own, beyond the reach of the mother country to help or hinder you.
So all hail the tale of the pale.
- And that's today's word from the bird
