[ql06] GENERAL: A private view of testimony
- From: Sheldon Erentzen <sheldon.erentzen@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: QL'06 newslist <ql06@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 22 Oct 2003 13:41:01 -0400
This article gives a whole new meaning to the idea of testifying.
Perhaps the oath should be: " I swear to tell the truth, the whole
truth, and nothing but the truth...so help my balls."
As appearing in Oct. 22 2003 Globe and Mail
A private view of testimony
By WARREN CLEMENTS
Words have the darnedest ancestors. Consider our court system, in which
people testify and give testimony. Who, apart from those already in the
know, would link those words to the testicles?
All three words derive from the Latin word testis, meaning witness,
which is also the source of protest and attest. The testicles got their
name from the diminutive form, testiculi, meaning little witnesses,
because they bore witness to a man's virility (vir being Latin for man).
In fact, a letter to Ms. magazine once protested against the use of the
word testimony when referring to a woman's statements, "because the root
is testes, which has nothing to do with being a female." The
letter-writer suggested substituting "ovarimony."
The connection with witnesses is stronger still. It is claimed that in
Roman times, male witnesses at trials would place their hands over their
genitals when swearing to tell the truth. In a recent letter to
Britain's Private Eye magazine, D. G. Fletcher Rogers said the Roman
witness "then took the oath to the effect if he told porkies the
testicula would be cut off." (Porkies, short for pork pies, is Cockney
rhyming slang for lies.) Margaret Ernst, whose word-origin book In a
Word has the distinction of being illustrated by James Thurber, wrote of
the word testify: "Dating back to Biblical times, a witness swore to the
truth, or testified, by placing his hand on the source of life and
manhood, the testes. The King James version, in a polite euphemism, says
that an oath is taken by placing the hand upon the thigh."
Ernst herself is being coy when she says the hand was placed on "the"
thigh, since the private parts did not need to be one's own. In the Book
of Genesis, Abraham tells his servant to "put your hand under my thigh"
to swear that he would "not take a wife for my son from the daughter of
the Canaanites . . . So the servant put his hand under the thigh of
Abraham his master, and swore to him concerning the matter." Later in
the book, Jacob asks his son Joseph to do the same.
The Oxford Annotated Bible says this "old form of oath-taking reflected
the view that the fountain of reproductivity was sacred to the deity."
Similarly, A New Standard Bible Dictionary (whose editors in 1926
included the impressively named Melancthon W. Jacobus) wrote: "In
exceptional cases the hand might be placed upon the thigh of the person,
imposing the oath as a sign of regard for the mystery of generation,
whose source was God."
It is safe to say that any attempt to revive this protocol in a modern
courtroom might be misunderstood, and that one or other of the parties
might get testy -- which derives not from testis but from teste, the
head, since testy meant headstrong before it meant short-tempered. And
no, there won't be a test.
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