From Word on the Street by Ben Zimmer – WSJ Weekend
After a tense 15 rounds of voting that stretched over four days, Republican Rep. Kevin McCarthy was finally elected as the speaker of the House of Representatives in the wee hours of Saturday, Jan. 7. His reward? The Speaker’s gavel.
The gavel, which had previously been wielded by Rep. Nancy Pelosi when the Democrats held the majority in the last Congress, was ceremonially passed to Mr. McCarthy by the House Democrats’ new leader, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries. “Well, that was easy,” Mr. McCarthy quipped after the ordeal. The gavel—that small wooden mallet used by a presiding officer to call for order or accentuate a proclamation— has held symbolic power for centuries, investing authority in judges, auctioneers, and legislative leaders.
But the history of how the “gavel” got its name is a murky one. Most dictionaries unhelpfully state “origin unknown” in their entries for “gavel.” Some, like the Oxford English Dictionary, make etymological conjectures based on similar-sounding words. The OED suggests a relationship to “gaffle,” an obsolete word for “a steel lever for bending the crossbow,” coming from “gaffel,” a Dutch word for a fork. Another potential cousin of “gavel” is “gable,” a triangular section of a building’s wall between sloping sides of a roof, which goes back to the same fork-like Germanic root as “gaffle.”
“Gable” has even been rendered as “gavil” or “gavel” in Scottish English and other regional varieties. But what would gables on a house have to do with gavels in the hands of officials? The answer may lie in the secretive traditions of the Freemasons, a fraternal order rooted in medieval guilds devoted to stonemasonry. When the OED revised its entry for “gavel” last year, executive editor Peter Gilliver consulted with a Masonic historian to turn up examples dating back to a 1760 book of rituals known as “The Three Distinct Knocks.”
The text refers to a “common gavel” used by stonemasons “to knock off all superfluous matters, whereby the square may set easy and just.” The tool, which traditionally has a head that is flat on one side and pointed on the other, became the authoritative emblem for the master of a Masonic lodge, rapped to punctuate the lodge’s proceedings. When Freemasonry spread to the American colonies, one prominent member of a Virginia lodge was George Washington, who is said to have used a stonemason’s gavel when laying the cornerstone of the U.S. Capitol building in 1793.
Over the next few decades, the tool moved from Masonic gatherings to governmental settings, though it was sometimes referred to not as a “gavel” but as a “hammer” or “mallet.” One recently discovered example of “gavel” illustrates its early spread from Masonic roots. On Nov. 23, 1842, the Baltimore Sun reported on a meeting of Washington, D.C.’s city council in which “a tap from the President’s gavel brought them to order.” Perhaps not coincidentally, the council president at the time, Benjamin B. French, was an active Freemason.
French went on to serve as clerk of the House of Representatives—a position currently filled by Cheryl Johnson, who wielded the gavel during Mr. McCarthy’s long fight for the speakership. Evidence for the “gavel” in the House dates back to an 1843 article in the Daily Madisonian, a D.C. newspaper, which detailed a noisy debate that was brought to order by “the voice and the gavil of the Chair.” (The “gavil” spelling appeared in other accounts of House floor debates in the 1840s but soon lost out to “gavel.”)
By 1860, the usage of “gavel” had spread to auctioneers and judges, and the word started to be used as a verb as well, as in “gaveling for order” or “gaveling down” an unruly speaker. One can also “gavel through” legislation—which Mr. McCarthy can do now that the gavel in his possession.
Bastrop County Beacon: News with Integrity, Because Facts Matter.
http://www.bastropcountybeacon.com
Keep informed on events and situations in Bastrop County by following the Bastrop County Beacon’s Facebook page!
