Word of the Week: Have We Really All Been Saying It Wrong?
- Both
- Dec 2, 2020
- 2 min read
While reading one of my new favorite books of 2020, I came across a word I thought must be a typo. It happens more often than one might think -- and being the grammar policewoman that I am, a missed comma, extra space, or added letter is somewhat of a delightful discovery for me. But after coming across the word a second time in the same book, I knew I was dealing with unchartered word territory and of course, a new word of the week!
The word in question is gantlet, and its context was, "to run the gantlet." You can see why initially I believed there was a letter missing, as the common phrase, to throw down the gauntlet was playing in the back of my head. What I didn't realize is that (unfortunately yet unsurprisingly) there are two very similar words that should be used in different situations. Isn't English the worst?
A 2009 Chicago Tribune article details the outpour of criticism they received after an article titled, "The gantlet," which detailed how some Chicago public school students dodge gangs and violence en route to class was published -- so much so that the term was No. 10 on Google's most-searched words the next day.
Similarly, in a 2010 LA Times article titled, "A gay teenager's daily gantlet," about the torment of a bullied gay teen, caused grammar aficionado uproariousness -- with readers convinced the proper word should have been "gauntlet."
So who's correct in this battle? Let's just say in the journalism world, the customer is not always right. Most newsrooms use Associated Press (AP) style as well as Webster's New World College Dictionary, both of which prefered the term gantlet in these cases.
The original definition of the word gantlet dates back to medieval times and refers to a form of punishment in which people armed with sticks and weapons arrange themselves in two lines and repeatedly beat a person who's forced to run back and forth between them. Yikes. This evolved to a more simple definition of a "flogging ordeal," both literally and figuratively.
Alternatively, a gantlet can refer to a type of railroad track construction used in narrow places, in which two parallel tracks converge so that their inner rails cross, run parallel, and diverge again, so that a train may remain on its own track the whole time.
Gauntlet, however, is still a proper word. It also dates back to medieval times, and is the term for the chain mail gloves that knights wore. Thus, the phrase, "throw down the gauntlet," which means to issue or accept a challenge, uses gauntlet in the glove-related sense, as knights would challenge each other to duels by literally taking off and throwing down, their gauntlets.
To run the gantlet, however, is the proper way to state the phrase referring to suffering punishment or enduring an onslaught or ordeal.
