Some might look at the reintroduction of stricter lockdown measures as the consequences of us (or at least some of us, for which the rest are also being punished) having violated our parole conditions.
We promised to be good but we were not. We promised to wear masks, stay away from others and wash our hands constantly, but we did not.
As a result, not only have our freedoms and privileges been revoked but our nonconforming behaviour has been criminalised.
This is what happens to prisoners who are conditionally set free. They have to report to parole officers who check that they are keeping their word. If they don’t, back to tjoekie they go.
Tjoekie, the Afrikaans slang word for jail, sometimes spelt “chookie”, has been adopted by speakers of many other languages in SA. It comes from the English slang word for prison — “chokey” — which has its origins in the idea that the free air one breathes has been cut off when one is imprisoned and therefore one is choking. I made up that bit about choking.
It is completely untrue. Tjoekie and its parent chokey both derive from the Hindi word cauki, which in colonial times, when the British ruled India, was a miscellaneous structure — a police station, a custom house or perhaps even a toll booth or Wendy house — in which anyone who had done something deemed to be wrong was locked up.
Parole comes from the Latin paraula, meaning speech or discourse.
This is how words are colonised and their spellings (though not always their pronunciations) are bastardised to serve the needs of another language. One could say this is how the world is unified.
Getting back to parole. In English it is both verb and noun for a conditional release. In other Latin-based languages it retains its original meaning, which is “word”.
I have just read Guardian writer Hadley Freeman’s latest book, House of Glass, which is about the history of her ancestors. Much of this impeccably researched investigation takes place in France, where Freeman’s great-uncle Jacques had a chance to escape from a French internment camp when, in 1941, he was granted a day’s leave to visit his newborn child.
His siblings, who knew more about what was going on in wartime Europe, urged him not to return lest he be shipped off to his end in a concentration camp. But his wife, who like Jacques clung to the hope that their adopted country wished its Jewish citizens no harm, prevailed, saying: “Mon Jacques a donne sa parole.” My Jacques gave his word.
This illustrates, in a deeply tragic way, the relationship between parole and word. And the fracture between word and deed, perhaps.
“Parole” comes from the Latin paraula, meaning speech or discourse. In French, parole still means just a word; in Italian it is parola. Only in the early 1900s did parole become an English word for the conditional release of a prisoner, based on the French expression parole d'honneur — “word of honour”.
This is how we got the phrase: “I gave him my word.” A word is like a promise; it should not be broken. Nor should parole, unless your life depends on it and you were unjustly imprisoned to start with.
Such are the vagaries of language that while a vast proportion of English words derive from Latin — and are therefore similar to those used by the French, Italians, Spanish and Portuguese — sometimes we got all rebellious and instead co-opted words from other cultures. The word “word” comes from the Proto-Germanic wurda, meaning to speak or to say, which gave rise to similar wurds in Scandinavian tongues.
Incidentally, the Online Etymology Dictionary includes in its entry for the word “word” a quote by Puerto-Rican poet and physician William Carlos Williams:
“It is dangerous to leave written that which is badly written. A chance word, upon paper, may destroy the world. Watch carefully and erase, while the power is still yours, I say to myself, for all that is put down, once it escapes, may rot its way into a thousand minds, the corn become a black smut, and all libraries, of necessity, be burned to the ground as a consequence.”
A lucid argument for judicious censorship if ever there was one. And a rational explanation for why Donald Trump’s social media accounts were again suspended this week. Those who constantly break their words do not deserve parole.
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