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Essays for Today and Tomorrow
Vive la Fenetre
by Joe Campbell
“When Merriam-Webster OnLine conducted a survey to find out the top ten favorite words, number one on the list was: ‘defenestration,’” —Netscape News, May 24, 2004
D
efenestration has to be one of the ugliest words in the English language. It is also one of the most intriguing. Perhaps it’s an active part of your vocabulary. It is not an active part of mine, although I rather wish it were.
Defenestration means throwing a person or thing out the window. Whether conceived to execute criminals, punish children, discipline spouses, banish unwelcome guests, or merely relieve tension, the idea intrigues me. Wouldn’t you be intrigued if, strolling down a residential street, you were to see the contents of a house flying out of the windows? Wouldn’t you be even more intrigued if the missiles were a father, a mother, a son, a daughter, a grandfather, a grandmother, or all of the foregoing? I certainly would be.
We often hear about people jumping out of windows, but there’s no word for it. What this tells me is that throwing people out of windows must have been more popular in the past than jumping out of windows is at present. Words don’t arise in a vacuum. They come into use in response to some reality.
The interesting question is how frequent or persistent does a reality have to be before it gets its own word. We’ve been throwing people out of trains, cars and planes ever since they were invented, but we haven’t felt the need to coin new words to describe these forms of ejection. This makes talking about them a bit awkward. How much more succinct the title would have been, not to mention the promotion and the reviews, if there had been a single word to describe what went on in the movie Throw Momma from the Train.
I first heard about defenestration in high school, when we were studying the Thirty Years’ War. The Defenestration of Prague, which preceded the war, refers to the trial, conviction and punishment of two imperial regents for violating guarantees of religious liberty. The offending regents and their secretary were thrown from the windows of Prague Castle on May 23, 1618. They were not, apparently, seriously injured, which is also intriguing.
Defenestration, no doubt, sprang from the same root as the French fenetre. Ouvrez la fenetre was the second command I learned in French, right after Fermez la bouche. I suspect that my Grade IX French teacher issued the commands in that order for disciplinary reasons. If we refused to stop talking in class, she wanted a window open so she could throw us out.
I do not favor capital punishment under current circumstances. We have other means of controlling dangerous offenders. I never much cared for hanging, drawing and quartering anyway. Nor do I fancy electrocution or lethal injection. But defenestration—now there’s a temptation I could succumb to.
There’s something enchanting about windows, whether throwing out of them, jumping out of them or merely looking out of them. That, no doubt, is why windows and casements often help to create the mood in romantic and heroic verse. When Juliet appears at an upstairs window, Romeo, love-sick fool that he is, mistakes her for the sun. In “Ode to a Nightingale,” Keats tells us about charmed magic casements opening on the foam of perilous seas, and in “Holy Grail,” Tennyson writes of twelve great windows that blazon Arthur’s wars. Hollywood benefited from this artistic legacy in Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller Rear Window, in which the window played the leading role.
I’ve never experienced the forbidden pleasures of throwing people out the window. In moments of pique I’ve thrown things out the window, though nothing larger than a recalcitrant typewriter. Once, in Grade X, I threw myself out of a classroom window to win a bet. When the teacher looked away to write on the blackboard, I climbed onto the sill and jumped into a flower bed a few feet below. As my startled classmates leapt from their seats and moved toward the window en masse to see what was happening, I scrambled back into the school via the front door. In the confusion, and while the teacher was upbraiding everyone else, I slipped into the room and regained my desk unobserved. It was the first high school caper I got away with and I’ve been fascinated by windows ever since.
Nowadays, windows in most new buildings are sealed shut. This doesn’t prevent defenestration but certainly discourages it. There’s no romance in broken glass. If you can’t open them, they’re not really windows in my opinion. They’re glass walls. Genuine windows don’t just admit light; they let in fresh air. They don’t just allow you to see out; they allow you to be thrown out.
Sealing them shut could be part of a nefarious plot to severely limit their use. Like gun control, window control may be another bureaucratic ploy to save us from ourselves. 