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A section for all you budding etymologists where each week the origin of a word or phrase is investigated.
workplace stress. This originated in the USA in 1990s
This week it is..... Get medieval
following several incidents from 1986 onward, in which
Use violence or extreme measures.
The expression ‘get medieval’ was coined in the USA individuals working for the United States Postal Service
is fairly recent years. It joins a list of figurative phrases workers shot and killed fellow workers and members
of the ‘become crazy’ form. These include venerable of the public. The first event of this kind was in August
expressions like ‘go berserk’, ‘run amok’, ‘go haywire’ 1986, when fourteen postal workers were killed and six
wounded by gunshot in an Oklahoma post office, by
and, more recently, ‘go postal’.
The allusion in ‘get medieval’ is clearly to the forms of Patrick Sherrill, himself a postal worker, who later shot
torture that were in use in the Middle Ages, the best- himself. Between that date and 1997 there were more
known of which was the rack. This grisly stretching than 40 deaths in 20 such incidents.
apparatus was used to extract retractions of faith from The term was first recorded in the Florida newspaper
both Protestants and Catholics during the 15th and 16th The St. Petersburg Times, December 1993:
centuries in England. A notable victim was Cutbert “The symposium was sponsored by the U.S. Postal
Simson, who is shown in the accompanying image, Service, which has seen so many outbursts that in some
which records his torture in 1558. He was probably circles excessive stress is known as ‘going postal’.”
relieved when he was released from the rack, but not Despite the unfortunate reputation gained by the US
Postal Service as a result of these murders, statistics
for long - he was burned at the stake soon afterwards.
The person who brought the phrase ‘get medieval’ to measured over the longer term show that the service is
the public’s attention is Quentin Tarantino, who, with no more stressful than other comparable occupations
Roger Avary, wrote the screenplay to the 1994 film Pulp and the number of incidents of workplace rage no worse
Fiction. In the film, the character Marsellus Wallace than other forms of employment.
swears revenge on an attacker:
I ain’t through with you by a damn sight. I’m gonna
git Medieval on your ass.
Tarantino leaves it to our imagination what the revenge
will be but, as Wallace says it is going to involve “a pair
of pliers and a blow-torch”, we can assume a degree of
unpleasantness.
Tarantino and Avary didn’t coin the phrase however. It
was in occasional use by the 1970s. The earliest use that
can be found of it is in another form of pulp fiction, a
cartoon strip in the Ohio newspaper The Lima News,
October 1971 (right). The cartoon suggests that the
expression wasn’t then used as a reference to extreme
violence.
As a related aside, the phrase ‘Go postal’ means to
fly into a violent rage, especially when provoked by
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