Bar
is a versatile word. Its definitions—as a noun—in the Oxford English Dictionary (Compact Edition) take up more than six
columns. Some of the meanings
are: a piece longer than it is
wide, of wood, metal, stone, soap, chocolate, etc.; a heraldic device of two
lines drawn horizontally across a shield; the transverse ridged divisions of a
horse’s palate; that which confines, limits, or closes; a vertical line across
a stave to divide a musical composition; a game also known as prisoner’s base;
a legal plea of sufficient force to stop an action or order; an obstacle, a
barrier; a court of law; the whole body of barristers (lawyers); a barrier
separating the seats of spectators from the official portion of a court or
other assembly, to which students were called when they had attained sufficient
learning, hence the word barrister; a
large European fish also known as a maigre;
a barrier or counter over which food or drink is served, and hence,
sometimes the whole establishment; a standard (as in raising the bar); a handrail used by ballet dancers for support
while exercising (although balletomanes prefer the Frenchified spelling barre).
Its earliest meaning was
apparently a “stake or iron rod used to fasten a door or gate.” The OED’s first instance was in 1175, when The Lambeth Homilies mention “the barren of helle.” Wyclif’s 1388
Bible uses the word in its rendition of Numbers Chapter 4 verse 10—“Thei
schulen putte in barris,” which the King James Version has as They shall put
it…upon a bar.”
By the 1580s bar meant a bank of sand in a harbor or
river mouth (which is what Tennyson referred to in “Crossing the Bar”), and by
1833 soap came in bars. Not until 1906 did chocolate make it is appearance in
that form. “Bar graphs” appeared 1925, “behind bars” meaning to be in prison in
1934 (although by 1642 Richard Lovelace told us that “stone walls do not a
prison make/nor iron bars a cage”); and “bar code” in 1963.
As a verb, bar
has several more columns in the OED.
The word first popped up
in Middle English barre, adopted from
Old French barre, a phonetic
descendant of late Latin barra—which
is, as you might have guessed, of unknown origin. Friedrich Diez, a 19th-century
German etymologist, thought it came from Old Irish barr, meaning “bushy top”—but that theory has been dismissed by
most linguists, who point out that it has no relationship to any of the
meanings of the word.
The Bard of Buffalo
Bayou knows of only kind of bar, out of which he has been tossed on numerous
occasions for conduct unbecoming a poet.
“D.
Boon kilt a bar”
Was
carved upon a tree,
Not
very circumspectly.
Just
five words there are,
And
if you look, you’ll see
Only
one is spelled correctly.
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