Well, that's what it said on the ad board for the local paper, outside the newsagents. But what does it mean? 

Imagine trying to make sense of it if you weren't a native English speaker. What does 'gauntlet' mean, for starters? Apparently 'the iron glove of armour' (Chambers Concise). Armour? What armour? And if a gauntlet's a glove, what's a 'strike gauntlet'? And running a country's one thing, but what's Mr Blair doing 'running' a glove? 

Where would you start?

Idle curiosity took us to Google, which in turn took us to http://www.m-w.com/mw/textonly/wftw/97sept/91797.htm - which proved to be a positive goldmine of this kind of linguistic trivia, maintained by Merriam Webster (as in 'Webster's Dictionary), where we discovered that: 

"The first gauntlet dates from the fifteenth century. We borrowed it from French, where it literally meant "little glove", but it is ultimately of Scandinavian origin. The original gauntlet was a protective glove worn with medieval armor. This is the gauntlet in the phrase throw down the gauntlet, meaning "a challenge to combat," an expression that arose from the medieval custom of throwing a glove on the ground to issue a challenge to a rival.

But it is not the gauntlet in the phrase run the gauntlet. That gauntlet came into English two hundred years after the first one, derived from a form of military punishment in which a prisoner was made to run between two rows of men armed with clubs or other weapons. At first, English speakers called such a punishment a gantlope, a derivative of the Swedish gatlopp, from gata, meaning "road," plus lop, meaning "course."

Through a process called folk etymology, people transformed the Swedish word into the more familiar gauntlet."

Isn't that superb? If this kind of thing tickles you as much as it does us, try the link and find out lots of stuff you never knew about words and expressions from the simple ('rice') through the tricky ('puns') to the controversial ('That or which', 'Apparently and evidently'). Reams of evidence, as if we needed it, that the language we use, with all its richness and variety, is bastard offspring of a thousand tongues and parent to the very way we think.

Something worth thinking about...we think.


Alan Paterson
ampers&
020 7379 5869
www.wherewordswork.com

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