Maiden (pronounced meyd-n)
(1) A girl or young unmarried woman; a maid (archaic but
still in literary and poetic use).
(2) A female virgin (archaic); used also of unmarried young
females in the sense of a “bachelorette” (a spinster being “a maiden aunt”).
(3) In horse racing, a horse which has never won a race.
(4) In horse racing, a race open only to maiden horses.
(5) As “clothes maiden”, a northern English dialect form
describing a frame on which clothes are hung to dry (a clothes horse).
(6) A machine for washing linen (obsolete).
(7) An instrument resembling the guillotine, once used in
Scotland for beheading criminals.
(8) As “maiden name”, a woman’s surname, prior to taking
that of her husband upon marriage.
(9) In land management, as virgin soil, virgin forest
etc, an area in its natural state; unexploited.
(10) In pre-modern agriculture, the last sheaf of grain
harvested, decorated with ribbons and regarded as a talisman (by extension the
end of the harvest) (archaic).
(11) In botany, a tree or shrub grown from seed and never
pruned.
(12) In cricket, as “maiden over”, for a bowler to
complete an over (now six legitimate deliveries) without conceding a run; a “wicket
maiden” is an over in which a wicket fell with no runs being scored (thus double-wicket
maiden & hat-trick maiden).
(13) Of, relating to, or befitting a girl or unmarried
woman (archaic but preserved in phrases such as “her maiden virtues”. “a maiden
blush” et al).
(14) Of an unmarried woman, older than a certain age
(generally past middle age), often in the form “maiden aunt”.
(15) Something made, tried, appearing etc, for the first
time (maiden flight, maiden speech, maiden voyage etc).
(16) In military slang, an untested (or untried in
battle) knight, soldier or weapon; a fortress never captured or violated.
Pre-1000: From the Middle English mayden & meiden, from
the Old English mæden & mægden
(unmarried woman (usually young); virgin; girl; maidservant), originally a
diminutive of mægð or mægeð (virgin, girl; woman, wife), the
construct being mægd, mægth or mægeth, from the Proto-West Germanic magaþ, from the Proto-Germanic magaþs
& magadin (young womanhood,
sexually inexperienced female) (and cognate with the Old Norse mogr (young man), the Old Irish maug & mug (slave), and the Gothic magaths)
+ -en (the diminutive suffix). The Proto-Germanic was the source also of the
Old Saxon magath, the Old Frisian maged, Old High German magad (virgin, maid), the German Magd (maid, maidservant), the German Mädchen (girl, maid) from Mägdchen (little maid), the feminine variant
of the primitive Indo-European root maghu-
(“young of either sex; “unmarried person” and the source also of the Old
English magu (child, son, male
descendant), the Avestan magava- (unmarried)
and the Old Irish maug & mug (slave)). Maiden is a noun & adjective, maidenly is
an adjective, maidenship & maidenhood
are nouns and maidenish is an adjective; the noun plural is maidens.
Iron Maiden is a heavy metal band active since 1975, their eponymous album in 1980 the debut release of studio-recorded material. Their album cover-art has become something of a motif and is widely reproduced in posters, T-shirts and such, their music is said to possess a similar consistency.
In thirteenth century Middle English, “maiden” could be
used as a slur to refer to “a man lacking or abstaining from sexual experience”
and in Scotland it was the official term for a guillotine-like device used to
behead criminals. In horse racing, a
maiden horse is one which has never won a race (although in the mid-eighteen
century it was sometimes used of horses which had not previously contested a
race. A maiden race is one restricted to
maiden horses (which can be mares, stallions or geldings). The figurative sense of "new, fresh,
untried” (maiden flight, maiden speech, maiden voyage etc) seems first to have
been used in the 1550s. The idea of the
maiden name (a woman’s surname, prior to taking that of her husband upon
marriage) dates from the 1680s. The noun
maidenhood (state of being a maiden; state of an unmarried female; virginity)
was from the Old English mægdenhad
while the adjective maidenly (like a maid, becoming to a maid; gentle, modest,
reserved) was first documented in the mid 1600s.
Headbanger Lindsay Lohan in Iron Maiden T-shirts.
The term Hiroshima maiden (or A-bomb maiden) was in the 1950s used to refer to the Japanese & Korean women disfigured by the radiation from the A-bombs dropped on Hiroshima or Nagasaki in August 1945, the term coming into use in 1955 when they were sent to the US for reconstructive plastic surgery. In Norse mythology, the billow maidens were any of the nine daughters of the sea-god Ran and a skjaldmær (shieldmaiden) was a female virgin who had chosen to fight as a warrior in battle. In several tales from mythology, an ice maiden was one of the ice people (or people of the ice), a woman from a place of snow and ice (in popular culture, the idea was borrowed in fantasy writing. In idiomatic use, an ice maiden (also ice princess or ice queen) is a beautiful but cold (heartless) woman. In Westminster parliamentary systems, the maiden speech of a member is their first substantive address to a chamber. By convention it is (1) uncontroversial and (2) listened to by the house in polite silence although in cases where the member has not followed the convention, there have been some famous interjections. Maiden ventures by machinery have sometimes become infamous. Ships have sunk on their maiden voyages including RMS Titanic (1912) and the Wasa (or Vasa), a Swedish warship at the time one of the fastest and most heavily gunned in the world (1628). In aviation, many aircraft have crashed on their maiden flights (test pilots are truly intrepid types) although it’s a myth that included the Supermarine Spitfire. Less fortunate was the German industry in the later stages of World War II (1939-1945) when development was being rushed and at least two prototypes are known to have either crashed or suffered severe damage during their maiden test flights including the Heinkel He 162 Volksjäger (People's Fighter). In the case of the He 162 the maiden flight actually ended without incident and it was only a subsequent investigation of the airframe (after another prototype He 162 had crashed) which revealed the adhesive used to bond wooden components was so acidic it caused the timber to disintegrate.
An iron maiden towering above other instruments of torture.
The infamous torture chamber known as the iron maiden is now though to
be mythical and an invention of those who wished to characterize the Middle
Ages as a time of barbarism and savagery.
It was said to be a solid iron cabinet with a hinged front, large spikes
fitted throughout the interior and designed to be large enough to accommodate an
adult human. Once the door was closed,
it was said to be impossible to avoid being “spiked” and with every movement,
one became “more spiked”. Although their
existence has been disproved, iron maidens (most apparently built in the
nineteenth century) are a popular exhibit in “museums of torture”, some probably
genuine “torture coffins” to which the spikes were a latter addition. Quite why it was felt necessary to “invent”
the iron maiden given there were so many examples of equally gruesome Medieval torture
devices isn’t clear but it may be there was some desire to exonerate the
torturers of Antiquity who really did use such things; among post Renaissance
historians, such was the veneration for the Classical world that wherever
possible, things were blamed on the Middle Ages.
In the English legal system, maiden assize came to mean an
assize (periodic courts with on a circuit basis were conducted around England
and Wales until 1972,) at which there were no criminal cases to be heard although
originally it was an assize at which no prisoner was condemned to die. There used to be some ritualism attached to
the declaration of a maiden assize and the tradition wasn’t unknown in the
US: If a judge, upon opening a session
of their assize found there were no cases to be heard, the clerk of the court
would present him with a pair of white gloves, the marker of a maiden assize,
the significance being that judges, as a mark of submission to the Crown, were
always gloveless when executing the royal commission.
No comments:
Post a Comment