For the Insider
For a while now I have been seeing a New Hampshire wine in the supermarkets being sold as coming from the home of Peyton Place. Once upon a time, people would have been trying to hide any association with that infamous book (still interesting enough, by the way, that it should have been a no-brainer as the CPL choice for the Concord Reads program on its 50th anniversary).
A couple weeks ago, however, I noticed a new wine called Ravage. What were they thinking?
Ravage, you see, is a word that generally means to devastate, lay waste, despoil, plunder, or create havoc or destruction. Ravaging a restaurant that served this beverage would leave it in ruins.
Samuel Richardson, in Pamela, one of the founding works of the English novel, in which the eponymous heroine fights to keep her virtue, wrote of “that very innocence, which tempts some brutal ravager to ruin it.”
And what about despoil, one of ravage’s synonyms? In 1225, when it first appears in English, it means to strip of clothes, as an act of violence.
It will come as no surprise, then, that both ravage and despoil can be used as synonyms for rape, from 1400 and meaning to carry away a person, especially a woman, by force. This is what the Romans did with the Sabine women (and I hope you get to see David’s great painting in the Louvre some day), who become “the sobbin’ women” when Howard Keel advices his siblings in that song in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (something else to see).
To get to the punch line, rape is also what the men might do to the women after they have been abducted. Ravage, despoil, rape – one and the same, you might say. To compound the problem, the wine’s advertising slogan is “Honor the Night.” Echoes here of Take Back the Night rallies, but with a very different feel to it all.
But that ain’t all, folks. There’s a tee shirt for women called the “Despoiler.” And it’s preshrunk to be a size smaller than normal, which suggests that it emphasizes contours of the female body. What were they thinking?
I hope no one will conclude that I am displaying political correctness here. I prefer to call it linguistic exactitude. The computer, I see, wants me to write “some day” as one word. Only after they pry my books on language from my cold, dead hands.
