{"id":113,"date":"2013-07-21T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-07-21T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/yule-tide.generalsemiotics.net\/index.php\/2013\/07\/21\/post-106-where-does-the-word-philistine-come-from-answer-youd-never-guess\/"},"modified":"2013-07-21T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2013-07-21T00:00:00","slug":"post-106-where-does-the-word-philistine-come-from-answer-youd-never-guess","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/2013\/07\/21\/post-106-where-does-the-word-philistine-come-from-answer-youd-never-guess\/","title":{"rendered":"Post-106: Where Does the Word ‘Philistine’ Come From? (Answer: You’d Never Guess)"},"content":{"rendered":"
From The Bonfire of the Vanities<\/strong>:\n<\/div>\n

Mrs. Rawthrote leaned still closer, until their faces were barely eight inches apart. She was so close she seemed to have three eyes. “Aubrey Buffing,” she said. Her eyes kept burning into his.<\/p>\n

“Aubrey Buffing,” said Sherman lamely. It was really a question.<\/p>\n

‘The poet,” said Mrs. Rawthrote. “He’s on the short list for the Nobel Prize. His father was the Duke of Bray.” Her tone said, “How on earth could you not know that?”<\/p>\n

“Of course,” said Sherman, feeling that in addition to his other sins he was also a philistine. <\/strong>“The poet.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I was curious about the origin of the word “philistine”. It means something like “bourgeois” in the way the old Marxists sneeringly used that word, I guess. Right, but what about its origin? I thought it must have something to do with the Bible, but I had no idea what.<\/p>\n

It turns out that it doesn’t<\/em> have much to do with the Bible. In fact, “philistine” has an amazingly-specific history: The term was unintentionally “coined” by a pastor in Germany in 1693 in reaction to a murder. It was popularized in the 1700s as German university slang, and had seeped into highbrow German by the 1800s, and some English-speakers were aware of it. It was first printed in English in 1827. It entered English in-earnest<\/em> in the 1860s-1870s, via the efforts of Matthew Arnold.\n<\/div>\n

\nWord History: <\/em><\/strong> It has never been good to be a Philistine. In the Bible Samson, Saul, and David helped bring the Philistines into prominence because they were such prominent opponents. Though the Philistines have long since disappeared, their name has lived on in the Hebrew Scriptures. The English name for them, Philistines,<\/em> which goes back through Late Latin and Greek to Hebrew, is first found in Middle English, where Philistiens,<\/em> the ancestor of our word, is recorded in a work composed before 1325. Beginning in the 17th century philistine<\/em> was used as a common noun, usually in the plural, to refer to various groups considered the enemy, such as literary critics. In Germany in the same century it is said that in a memorial at Jena for a student killed in a town-gown quarrel, the minister preached a sermon from the text <\/strong>“Philister \u00fcber dir Simson!<\/strong> [The Philistines be upon thee, Samson!],”<\/em> the words of Delilah to Samson after she attempted to render him powerless before his Philistine enemies. From this usage it is said that German students came to use Philister,<\/em> the German equivalent of Philistine,<\/em> to denote nonstudents and hence uncultured or materialistic people. Both usages were picked up in English in the early 19th century.<\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 [From<\/a> <\/span>The American Heritage\u00ae Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition copyright \u00a92000]<\/font>\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Drawing from this and other quick research I’ve done, I can sketch out this timeline:<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span>Timeline of the Evolution of the Word “Philistine”<\/strong><\/font><\/p>\n