July 2, 1997

defenestrate

I've been searching for the history behind "defenestration" (my all-time favorite word) meaning roughly "to throw or be thrown through a window." Please help me lest I defenestrate (???) myself out of frustration.

Defenestrate, which means exactly 'to throw out of a window', is one of everyone's all-time favorite words. It's the epitome of the "hard word" that many people know, everyone finds amusing, and lends itself to all sorts of good use.

For the key to the word defenestration, we must look at political history, a subject largely untouched on this page. In 1617, Catholic officials in Bohemia closed Protestant chapels that were under construction, despite guarantees of religious freedom that the Protestants had been granted under an earlier emperor. A group of Protestants called an assembly, and two imperial commissioners were found guilty of violating the guarantee of religious rights and were thrown from a window of the palace in Prague. This event, on May 23, 1618, became known as the Defenestration of Prague, and touched off the Thirty Years' War, as Protestants from Bohemia and neighboring lands joined in a revolt against the authority of the Hapsburg Emperor Ferdinand II.

It is a little-known fact that the two defenestrated commissioners were booted out of a low window, and suffered no injuries. Nonetheless, it's a great story, and since everyone likes their history enlivened with Great Stories, the Defenestration of Prague is one that all of us were forced to learn about in high school. That's why the term is familiar to most people.

Although defenestrate has been used for centuries referring to this event, the current, somewhat jocular use seems to have become popular relatively recently (early twentieth century). It is still frequent, especially in the figurative sense 'to take harsh action against; fire (a person) (from a job)', etc. Two examples: "The rapper went on to make the odd declaration 'I don't throw babies out of windows,' no doubt prompting nationwide police-data-base searches for unsolved baby defenestrations (New York, 1994), and the useful figurative "He and Ed Fancher were defenestrated by Clay Felker in 1974" (Nat Hentoff, in the Village Voice, 1996).

Defenestrate comes from Latin, formed from de- 'out of; away from' and fenestra 'a window' (French fenêtre). It is first found in English in 1620, right after the Prague example.