There's a scene in the first season of Netflix's Daredevil show, which uh, I guess is actually a Disney + show now, in which a character curb-stomps another character to demonstrate that despite how the first character has been painted as sympathetic throughout the rest of the episode, he is not, in fact, a good dude.
It's not a literal curb-stomping, of course, he uses a car door instead. But the effect is disturbingly similar.
.jpg) |
| This was a Google image search for 'curb'. I'm not doing a search for 'curb-stomp'. |
See, the idea of curb-stomping is that it is, in essence, a brutal execution. Nothing so sweet or kind as a beheading via guillotine, or heck, even a neck-snapping hanging. No, curb-stomping is more like crucifixion; you will die, it will take a while, and you're going to be in incredible pain the entire time. If you do survive it will be with extensive painful injuries and a lifetime of trauma associated with corners. This is accomplished by laying someone's head and neck (or open mouth) against a curb and then, well... stomping on them. It's not pretty. It's not mild. And it's also the reason that I recently started wondering whether the colloquialism to "curb your enthusiasm" is related.
Because if so, that phrase is a way more hardcore indictment of enthusiasm than I'd ever considered it before. That's not the equivalent of "calm down", that's the equivalent of "these emotions you have; kill them. Kill them all."
Thus armed with a question I began seeking information, turning first to my most favoritest of sources, the Online Etymological Dictionary.
Etymonline has this to say regarding curbs; from the Proto-Indo-European root of 'sker-', the Latin 'curvare', meaning 'to bend', rose through Old French 'courbe' to 15th century English 'curb' as referring to a "strap passing under the jaw of a horse".
Oh jeez, phew. This is already a much rosier picture than I'd feared. The verb sense of the word was thus derived in the 1520s sometime as "to lead to a curb", literally 'curbing' your horse by leading it by the curb (or to a curb, details are hazy on that point. The sense of a curb being 'a stone retaining next to a road or path' may have been in use this early, but isn't attested to until the 1700s). From thence by the 1580s the figurative sense of curb was in use to indicate 'bending to one's will, to hold back.'
Right. So that's the sense from which we get 'curb your enthusiasm'; it's essentially in the same spirit as keeping your horse under control. This places it in essentially the same ballpark as the colloquial 'hold your horses'. So we're not executing emotions here, just holding them in check.
No, the only relation between the two is the curb itself as attested to in approximately 1775, when the use of "curbstone" first pops up. The place to which one might lead, or 'curb' their horse, along a path, road, garden, or so forth. Anywhere you have a low bullwark of earth that needs restraining, or, in what may be nothing more than a coincidence, 'curbing'. These curbstones became curbs over time, and then at some point a couple of people had a disagreement and somebody got stomped against one.
Weirdly, the only online etymology I can find for the curb-stomp is Urban Dictionary, which I'm sure you'll agree is hardly a valid academic source.
Y-you do agree with that... right?
Comments
Post a Comment